Image: Albatross chick, close up, Midway Island, North Pacific Ocean, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent
My blood is crude
A dull song
that doesn’t sing as it should
It stultifies these fingers
glues sternum to spine
occludes the workings of each eye
My blood covets
greedy in the dark
It will never have enough
While I’m asleep it leaches
into the soil into the sea
and there
two thousand miles from anything like me
it hardens and sharpens
slices seabirds out of the air
supplants their viscera
with board game organs
made to last a hundred lifetimes
builds nests of dolls’ house leavings
that double up as graves
in the guts of earthbound young
who cry out their numbered days
to the same blank sky
that has its blue hooks in my blood
And when they tear me open
and fill my veins with rain
maybe
there will be an end to this
Janet Lees
https://www.albatrossthefilm.com/
‘Albatross’, Janet’s response poem to ‘Albatross The Film’ by Chris Jordan, Director, Writer, and Editor, was commended in the 2022 Poetry Society Stanza Competition on the theme of The Environment, judged by Will Burns.
Janet Lees (janetlees.weebly.com) is a poet, artist and poetry filmmaker. Her 2019 book ‘House of water’ combines her poetry and art photography, while ‘A bag of sky’ won first prize in the Frosted Fires First Pamphlet competition 2019.
Her poetry has been widely published in journals and anthologies including Magma, Poetry news, Lighthouse, and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry. She has won prizes in many different competitions, such as the Bristol Poetry Prize, the Guernsey International Poetry Prize, and The Aesthetica Creative Writing Award Finalist, and was the winner of the Poetry News Members’ Poems competition on the theme of ‘Looking Back’, judged by Daljit Nagra.
Janet’s videopoems and art films have been selected for a very wide range of international festivals and screenings, including the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival and the Aesthetica Art Prize. In 2024 she won first prize in the Filmetry Festival in Michigan, and Best International Poetry Short at the Bloomsday Film Festival in Dublin. In 2022 her work featured in the landmark exhibition Poets with a Video Camera: Poetry Film 1980-2020 in Vancouver, and in 2021 she won the Ó Bhéal International Poetry Film Competition. Janet’s award-winning art photography has featured in solo and group shows around the world.
Janet Lees
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