Gradual Reduction to Bone probes the animal of us through the exploration of living entities, the repeated looping of time, the dogged wounds we inflict on our environment, and the creation/destruction duality.
Imbued with a contemporary-gothic atmosphere, crows float elegant in rigor mortis; pregnant vegetables strain to burst; mother shifts from deity to monster to mortal; invasive species invoke spectres; plants sooth metamorphic incantations. And bones – be them fractured bed frame/dismembered paw/spine of ancient chestnut/Earth’s ribs cranked open/a child’s snapping as she falls – dwell beneath the flesh of the pamphlet.
Kali Richmond
Kali Richmond is a York-based poet, with much of her writing inspired by the surrounding Dales, Moors and North Sea, and their array of wildlife. She grew up in a council flat in the most densely populated borough of London but spent most school holidays with her grandparents in the North Pennines and the Cotswolds, inspiring a lifelong yearning for vast open spaces.
She came to poetry in her early thirties, first inspired by women such as Fiona Benson and Rachel Bower who wrote of motherhood, and then by brilliant live readings held in York and Leeds from Rebecca Tamás, Roger Robinson, Malika Booker, Rachael Allen, Raymond Antrobus, A. K. Blakemore, Liz Berry, Hollie McNish etc. – predominantly working class voices playing a lead role in contemporary poetry.
She is a lapsed video artist and facilitator of VJ events, and is incorporating those skills into her poetry – adding a visual element to her work and planning collaborative art nights for when restrictions have fully lifted. She has been published in Gutter Magazine, Jaden Magazine, The Babel Tower Noticeboard, Porridge, Green Ink Poetry, Idle Ink and more. In 2020 she won both the Reflex Press and Lucent Dreaming flash fiction competitions.
After the Eruption
there was beauty of a kind that could not be easily
perceived from the ground. Those fissures of terror
were the craquelure glaze on the ancient vase
forged from earth, finished with fire. This land too is fire
kissed. Only nature remains. Not the bucolic green
of over-worked fields, nor their sensible grids
corralled by barbed wire. But the reaching of fault
lines, spider fingers of Mother, the flute of rising
song, the falsetto of combustion, the release of drawing
unconscious, unleashing convulsions. Nature
as in ochre, as in umber, as in charcoal, as in iron,
as in mushroom, as in ossein, as in bark, as in leaf
mulch. Ruination so rich it gifts mouth-
to-mouth nourishment. In the stolid blink of her eye
the embers teem with life, life as even we know it.
Vicissitude
Streaks of green have me commenting with graceless
awe. Yes, I’m unsettled by the sheen of emerald birds
against this leaden backdrop, the fug now visible, though
growing up I could not see it. Thirty years in this city
and everything about its rapid psyche whirring was normal.
Three years gone and I’m wading through miasma
of spectres, all those gin-soaked mothers, the debtors’
prison runners. You’ve yet to join the current familial
exodus so betray no surprise. They’re everywhere,
you don’t say, because didn’t we track their haunting
in shared emergence, our feathers salient in brilliant pink.
Under the silence of mourning we watch them cluster
in a plane, the tree clever enough to shed pollution with
its bark, and I think, I used to be able to do that, but now
look at me, wheezing, waxen, aiming my camera like a
tourist. Listen, you say, and they shriek in messianic tones,
reminiscent of parents soaked and running/reminiscent
of bygone twilight walks wedged between canal and zoo.
