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    The Attitudes
    The Attitudes
    The Attitudes
    Ebook103 pages1 hour

    The Attitudes

    By Katie Griffiths

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    About this ebook

    Katie Griffiths' debut poetry collection,The Attitudes is a search for trust and faith – in the body, in the mind, in all those things we seek to hold on to but cannot. Here, we intimately encounter mortality and tread the balance between visceral wisdom and the intellect, between fragile, fallible bodies, and the mind's hold over them, between the bright spaces and the haunted ones.
    In poems that are bold, effervescent, frequently playful, Griffiths approaches serious subjects - eating disorders, ageing, grieving - with a precise and inventive lyricism. The Attitudes compiles multitudes, with layer upon layer of counterpoints, juxtaposing and exploring the unresolvable, all the while seeking to move towards a place of deeper reflection and stillness away from the noise and distraction of the daily business of being alive. An astute and accomplished book which transforms
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNine Arches Press
    Release dateApr 15, 2021
    ISBN9781913437121
    The Attitudes
    Author

    Katie Griffiths

    Katie Griffiths grew up in Ottawa, Canada, in a family originally from Northern Ireland. In 2019 she was awarded second prize in the National Poetry Competition with ‘Do not indulge indigo’ and had the pleasure of reading her own Spanish translation of the poem at the Cosmopoética festival in Cordoba, Spain. Her pamphlet My Shrink is Pregnant (illustrated by Anna Steinberg) was a winner in the Live Canon pamphlet competition. In 2016 she was published in Primers Volume One by Nine Arches Press. A member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen and Red Door Poets, Katie is also singer-songwriter in the band A Woman in Goggles.

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      Book preview

      The Attitudes - Katie Griffiths

      And in our idleness we compare hands

      He says, exorcism

      improves flexibility of the hands.

      Hands clarify,

      throw light.

      I say, but hands are heavy-duty.

      They drag their body behind.

      And did he know, first cousin to a hand

      is not a foot but a rake. (Let the earth prepare.)

      He says, to focus the disintegrating mind

      you must place two fingers

      on the person’s eyes

      before you raise the eyelids.

      I say, my fingers

      are too stiff

      from questions.

      He says, it’s a spiritual emergency.

      He keeps a collection of items his clients

      have spat out. Keys. Nails.

      I say, I keep

      a magnifying glass to study

      my hands, their wrinkling –

      a new ordinance of skin.

      He says he saw four strapping men

      struggle to hold down a young girl.

      I say, I held my father close

      those last minutes before his hands

      dropped like starfish

      learning the ocean.

      Dough must not not enter the body

      i.

      One summer

      she learned how to eat.

      Not to swallow, just spit – crouch

      with jam pastries and a paper bag.

      She ate herself down to the cellar,

      each night painted a portrait

      of a harlot with lopsided hat

      that grew with each mistake:

      one botched eye had to go,

      hidden by an extended brim.

      Daytimes, balled against ribs

      of a wooden rowboat, she’d drift

      with the current, invisible

      to shore, trying to occupy

      less space yet at the same time

      disturb it more. For wasn’t that

      the communion wafer’s trick

      on the tongues of the pious?

      To dissolve. Disappear.

      Do the holy work.

      The Attitudes

      Insipid are the moonbathers

      for their light spills in small places.

      Torrid are those who amass

      for their trinkets will devour.

      Vapid are the earthmongers

      for their deals trample the nestfallen.

      Rigid are those who embellish

      for their fables will encrust.

      Sordid are the soulscammers

      for their workday sees no dusk.

      Candid are those who lactate

      for their largesse is passed on.

      Rapid are the waterstabbers

      for their targets leach away.

      Sacred are those who clamber

      for their vertigo instructs.

      Intrepid are the scargazers

      whose bodies weep for an end.

      Moonbather

      She is slink and fall.

      A trespass in the orchard

      that wrongfoots the trees.

      Her darkness is famished.

      She needs the kind of moon you

      grind in your teeth

      the kind of moon that never consoles.

      How she wants to feel sorry for

      you feeling sorry for her

      and all the light you fail to exchange.

      Under sombre whims

      her reason is permeable.

      See how readily she strips down

      and becomes moonlogged –

      innermost and full of retraction.

      She wants the kind of moon

      that saturates,

      the kind that rains calamitous pieces.

      Will you try to save her? Of course.

      You’ll drop footholds and rungs.

      You’ll call from your sill:

      sister sister shake out your limbs.

      Divine non-intervention

      It sours your day.

      Leaves a bad smell in the stairwell.

      What supreme being? Unless still

      lounging on Mount Olympus,

      dysfunctional. Certainly mauled by all sides.

      Pulled apart like moth wings.

      Expanding to the required diameter.

      Or none at all.

      Each time you reach for the remote

      you’re trapped alive. To be frank,

      the headlines alarm.

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