One of the most enriching, forward-thinking, fastest-growing online creative communities flourishing right now is the Poetry community, especially in those scenes that center on marginalized voices — Women, POC, Neurodivergent, and LGBTQ. Poetry Spotlight is a feature aiming to showcase the work of some of the most talented creators we’ve discovered making waves on the Internet literary circles, inside or outside the mainstream. This installment focuses on the work of UK-based poet Jennifer Lee Tsai.
Jennifer is a British poet of Chinese heritage. She was born in Bebington and grew up in Liverpool. A graduate of St Andrews and Liverpool Universities, she completed an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) with Distinction from the University of Manchester in 2015. Jennifer is a fellow of the acclaimed national poetry mentoring scheme, The Complete Works III. Her poems appear in the Bloodaxe anthology, Ten: Poets of the New Generation (2017) and have been published in Smoke, The Rialto, and Oxford Poetry. She is an Associate Editor for the Liverpool-based poetry magazine Smoke. In 2017, she was selected as a Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critic. Her reviews have been published by The Poetry School, the Poetry Book Society and in Modern Poetry In Translation. Currently, she is working on a first collection.
Black Star
He was everything I hadn’t wished for.
He opened up, like foxgloves do, and sucked me in.
He was a name I couldn’t say,
a train journey I shouldn’t have gone on.
He was a crow crowing over me.
His smile was bulletproof, flashing six gold teeth.
His energy sang in the empty spaces he left
like the chimes of Buddhist bells.
You Said
you saw me the other night in The Krazy House,
you were glad that I’d come up and spoken to you;
our meeting was a kind of kismet. You said
you’d call and you did – from a red telephone box though
the money ran out before we said what we wanted to say.
You said your last girlfriend was called Rachel,
she ran off with some guy to Scotland, who was ‘a drip’;
you’d really loved her. You said your brother was
schizophrenic and looked like Elvis when he was fat.
Kant was your favourite thinker; you rated Plato
and Keats. Midnight on New Year’s Day,
we sauntered through Princes Avenue
past the synagogue, the deserted Gothic church.
Fireworks ignited the indigo sky against the steeple,
its pinnacles and broach spire. Stars sparked
as we shimmied down the grassy strip and you said
you hoped someday there’d be no need for religion
‘something else instead’. A woman, who was a friend
of your sister’s, said you were very clever
but ‘not quite human’. When I told you, you laughed,
asked if that made you super-human and not to believe
a word they said. Another day, near Penny Lane
on the way to visit your mother, we bumped
into two of your mates; one of them was wearing plaid pants.
We were speeding as if the air was chivvying us along,
your arm tight around me all day and night
and the sun was so bright, it was summer.
You said you’d drawn a black and white picture
of me the day after we met, that it even
looked like me. On a dance-floor, you said you’d once
tried to stab yourself and I didn’t believe you.
Then you showed me a scar on your heart.
You said being with you gave me a certain air
and now I think maybe it was the other way around.
Your mum said she’d wanted you to leave
this city, get away from that bedlam crowd.
She said you’d stepped in front of a train,
just a few days before or was it after her birthday?
It was January, white with cold. You weren’t even thirty.
Doppelgänger
I’ve tried endless entreaties,
offered green tea sweetened with rose and lily
even dainty cups of osmanthus wine
but none of this appeases; she shrugs her shoulders,
a real crazy-maker, slides down the banisters,
half-drunk mugs of mocha on window sills,
her Arabian perfume oil of amber and oud
origami-ing out of books and magazines.
Twilight, she comes alive,
pirouettes like fire.
In the morning she leaves;
she can come and go as she pleases.
[“Black Star” and “Doppelgänger” are part of the anthology Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe, 2017); “You Said” was originally published in issue 87 of The Rialto]
