Poetry by Alice Carlill

                Richard P J Lambert CC



earth 

when my middle sister was a child, she would sit
strawberry-blonde marshmallowed
in the dining room and eat earwigs.
she’d cut them in half with her fist, and
thrust each bit into her mouth,
swallowing them down to sit in her stomach with the
pureed carrots and powdered milk. 

I thought of this when I watched the woman
fill her mouth with soil.
I understood that primal yearn,
the need to return to the dark and fertile –
the oozing secretions. 

if I – she – we – are the natural, then it is
of us. give me the legs of a millipede,
the supple sliming worm.
I will swallow it down
gullet-full stomach-stretched.
fill my mouth with mud, with earth,
fill me full.
hold my hair whilst I vomit.
wipe my brow, I am contorting.
watch me writhe. 

soil is a place of birth & death & birth again.
it nourishes and starves – it teems and contains.
it heaves.
it is heavy.
let me lie here under this.
​i am empty. 




Slivers 

there is a moment
when the late afternoon sun
slants through the pines
that everything stills. 

it is a landscape
of verticals – 

a renegotiation. 

language bursts berry red
against these slivers of gold,
but the silver birch stands,
a poetics of possibility. 

you close your eyes,
smell the settling frost,
and think maybe –
just maybe. 

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Alice is a female-identifying, London-based, queer dramaturg, script supervisor, poet and performer. As a script reader and supervisor, she has worked with Theatre503, Finborough Theatre, & Katzpace, and has performed her poetry at various London venues. She is currently collaborating with The Actor’s Box on performance-poetry workshops, writing a performance piece on queerness and liminality, and studying for her MA at Goldsmiths. Alice’s poetry has been published by Ghost City Press, and is forthcoming in GoldDust and Factory Magazine. She can otherwise be found reading a book with her 5 dogs somewhere. [Pronouns she/her].