New video by Penguin Books UK on YouTube

Poet Hera Lindsay Bird reads ‘Ways of Making Love’ from her poetry collection
Powerful young poet Hera Lindsay Bird explores the power, clumsiness, charm and absurdity of attraction in Ways of Making Love. Get the book at https://ift.tt/2N4803I For more LGBTQ writing, visit https://ift.tt/2wyz4xF and follow #PrideBookClub. FULL TEXT Like a metal detector detecting another metal detector. Like two lonely scholars in the dark clefts of the Cyrillic alphabet. Like an ancient star slowly getting sucked into a black hole. So hard we break international sporting legislation, leaving the conveners of the Olympics with a serious logistical challenge. You are a denim tree and I’m the world’s fastest autumn. I am the Atlantic Fortress, and you are General Sherman taking me from behind. You stride up the cold stone steps of parliament, waving a petition to orgasm. A lip of cloud brushes the roof of the barn. The pale trees curve around the eye and back into the brain. It’s like watching porn through a kaleidoscope. or a slow wind in a kite factory. It’s like dogs trying to do it people style, but failing due to the inflexibility of their anatomical structure. A cloud of bats float slowly up into your brain rafters. You roll down my stockings, like the sun peeling ocean from a soviet globe. I want you in the red shade of a mammoth in the Natural History Museum. In a seventeenth century field, tilling the earth like flesh tractors. In the airlock of a space station, my heart shaking like an epileptic star. Between the plastic sheets of a lobotomy table because writing poetry about having sex with someone when you could be having sex with them instead is the last refuge of the stupid. It’s like getting three wishes and wishing for less wishes. It’s like inventing a flag the exact same colour as the sky. It’s like crying over spilled milk before it’s out of the cow. It’s like breaking into a field at dawn with a flamethrower and fireballing the cow so you can get your crying over and done with and immediately begin adjusting to your new milkless existence. But loving you isn’t really like killing cattle no matter what poetry wants you to believe. The day is a vault the sun has cracked open money flying everywhere like really expensive leaves and here I am begging you to come back as if you were already gone ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe to the Penguin channel: https://ift.tt/2ygTzig Follow us here: Twitter | http://www.twitter.com/penguinukbooks Website | https://ift.tt/xNmtGX Instagram | https://ift.tt/2ygyyo2 Facebook | https://ift.tt/2wmBKky

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