Ruth Valentine has published one full-length collection, The Tide Table (Slow Dancer, 1998) and three pamphlets. The latest is The Announced (Sylph Editions, 2009) in Ellipsis 1, a book in three parts, with flash fiction from Frances Gapper and short stories by Bethan Stevens. Ruth’s next publication will be On the Saltmarsh (Editions la Serre) with woodcuts by Garry Kennard. She lives in Tottenham, North London.

Christoph Hueber

Powerpoint

I have circled the planet.
Above the tawny land of my ancestors,
the Arc of the Covenant on its holy mountain,
I saw the inside of a cotton bag
yanked down over my head; at my wrists and ankles
percussion of steel, blood, and the links’ negation.
Oh my grandfather in the Emperor’s palaces!

I have been freighted between the continents
like roses from Colombia, packed half-frozen,
secret above the cloud-layer. Calculate
the weight of my soul in food-miles, airfields, stars.

Wherever I was unloaded, it was the same
in tropical heat or frost, in the hood-blurred light
off whitewashed walls, in hangars;
the warders trained
by the same chalk-stripe men, in lecture rooms
I try to imagine: Powerpoint images,
role-play perhaps, with laughter, or simulation
on a mannequin sewn in India or Taiwan,
its hessian skin my colouring, my scars.

Commended, National Poetry Competition, 2007
and published on www.poetrysociety.co.uk;
from The Announced, Sylph Editions, spring 2009