3 poems by GB Clarkson

Culpology

I am interested in your excuses.

I’d like to snaffle at least one, from man-

oeuvres, fidgeting, damp, in your basket;

keep it alive, immured in my cloister-

kitchen, feed it on dogfood, befriend it,

study its habits, run hands through wire hair,

grip ginger fur, then tickle its tail, tan-

gerine, and lake-blue, till it starts to fan

open—vivid, transparent, French window-

lit, in the living-room. I’d like to ex-

amine in depth its impressionable heart,

expunge my poor excuse for a lover.

The Vitalist Messes up Again

In the very heartland of England, the xylem and pith and young zest of the

grand lost old country, the Vitalist drove home her advantage.

Contumely Actually

Badly used by a man who’d appeared big but was in fact very very small,

growing smaller until he was small enough to creep into a mousehole, wee,

sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, and as he shrank his vices yet groaned

inwardly like old timbers until they heaved and erupted from the crown of his

head and poked out from the mousehole into a curving moss-carpeted dell,

where like velvety winsome antlers they bifurcated into branches and roots, a

bucolic scene, which began to be populated by ferrets and rabbits and

weasels and to grow over with intricate fungi and complicated lichen, and in

season to proliferate with harebells and primroses, a favoured spot for

maidens to be invited to refresh themselves and be solicited—just you,

hen!—to be buxom matron to his little boy—it was always maidens, trusting

and uncomplaining, that he inveigled—his urgent messages and visuals

hopping with increasing insistence along the length of the logs, to warp and

wheedle, spatter and coax. The women, God be praised, always cottoned on

in the end.

___________

GB Clarkson lives in Warwickshire. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Poetry, The Poetry Review, The Rialto, Poetry London, Ambit, Magma, Shearsman Magazine, Tears in the Fence, and Under the Radar. Her most recent publication is The Vitalist Sees the Signs (Broken Sleep Books, 2025).