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Zelda Chappel
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the poet
Zelda Chappel's first collection, The Girl in the Dog-tooth Coat, was published by Bare Fiction Press in 2015. Her work has also appeared in a number of journals, anthologies and collaborative projects online and in print. Formerly the Editorial Curator of the now defunct Elbow Room mixed arts journal, Zelda continues to work as a creative mentor and workshop facilitator. She won the National Poetry Library's Battered Moons in 2014, and has been commended in a number of other competitions.
the poems
PTSD season
It is at the most inopportune of moments
I am caught remembering the pressures
of lip on lip & needing the salt of something
to savour it, remembering there is a sea
& it is ravenous for gritty light & bare
skinned sky, all vulnerable & daring
it’s delicious & blasphemous to think of
what I wasn’t, what it was, what failures
I wore instead of you I was sinking
still gladly taking on water, unknowing
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This time of year
they’re out pushing leaflets through the doors again
asking if we left our baby at St Peters if we know who did
and it gets me every time
I want to confess
I left my baby in a chapel too once
but she had already left me
on Skype we joke about time travel me six hours ahead and you
ask for no spoilers
so I tell you a have a new desk plant that I called her Callie
that there’s a delay on the line
and I can hear myself
and it’s strange
I ask if you’re coming back soon you don’t know
your aunt survives another season and no one thought she would
Bad air
and it was in this place I got caught growing light-sick
weed’s damp smell a bitter vexation, sweet
urine stench a warning in the alley we take every time
this is the beginning of the line and the end
and the light is tight as a lime, under-grown between
my lives, bad air is a grievance I can’t settle
this is the beginning of the line and the end and I mutter
our griefs constantly, solitude a scream in a fist
kept closed, the beginning of the line, the end and water
absorbs everything or simply unmakes
what we made beginning, the line, the end is tether
and death gets proved in our kneading
so hard I am breaking, breaking this beginning, end
Publishing credits
PTSD season: exclusive first publication by iamb
This time of year: The Interpreter's House (Issue 72)
Bad air: Luminous, Defiant (Listen Softly Press)
