Hannah Jane Walker
Hannah Jane Walker is a writer from Essex. She makes work that uses poetry as a way of talking, in theatres, public spaces and for radio, working with BBC Radio 4, the British Council, and Apples and Snakes. With collaborator Chris Thorpe, she has created interactive shows exploring questions which seem too simple to ask, winning a Fringe First and touring the world. Plays are published by Oberon and performance poetry by Nasty Little Press. Poems in anthologies by Forest Fringe and Penned in the Margins. She often works with vulnerable groups, collaborating to create artworks. She is an Associate Artist for Cambridge Junction and National Centre for Writing.
A study at 20
Frankly, there is a lot I donāt even admit to myself.
When I was in my twenties
I got really bloody-minded about asserting
my right to fuck whoever I wanted.
And apparently a lot of people wanted to fuck me.
I did things I canāt quite face.
But I do it to myself sometimes, reveal the truth
in little squares.
Some of the sex was excellent.
Most of it was boring and required cleaning up.
Once I slept with a man whose girlfriend
was asleep in the next room.
It ended up feeling like a job.
I betrayed friends, replaced them with louder, camper
friends who brought me pastries and Vogue in bed.
I used plates as ashtrays,
took things that didnāt belong to me,
took things I didnāt know the name of
in the non-places, that become places
that made me feel I could see inside myself.
Spread like milk across his bed
I bet you were devastating when you were seventeen
I love a girl with a snaggletooth
Iād hate to be attractive wouldnāt you?
He combs the Covent Garden cafes,
pockets filled with pens and postcards looking for girls
whose poems feature
the colour of their hearts, their favourite moment of sky.
He feeds them cream cakes and tap water tepid as saliva.
Spread like milk across his bed he follows logic
from shoulder to neck to ear.
Do you like your body?
Have you ever truly been loved?
When was the last time you gripped
a table, asked the whole room
to be quiet?
No one knows where you are
You drive me to a strip of neon,
buy beer and fried dumplings:
careful with the steam in your mouth.
You pull up in a place with no light.
You hold my wrist as we edge through the long grass.
What about snakes?
Itās not them you need to be frightened of.
Tip your neck back.
The trees laden with colonies of fat coat hangers,
bats twitching in their sleep.
I will definitely die soon
and deserve it.
I brace.
We walk to a clearing.
This is why we came.
I wait for the blade between my ribs.
You gesture to the line of eucalyptus
and sigh, usually girls love this.
The shark experience
When she is ready, hair capped,
someone leads her lightly by the elbow,
past great pools of turquoise.
The rubber locker band grips her wrist ā
the goggles fumbled, she
eclipses the ladder as her ankles dip.
The fin shudders the air grate ā
blindly nose cuts the surface,
flank bumping bubbles off the tiles.
She lets the lights track her backstroke.
Her arms turnstile,
her sinuses inhale antiseptic.
They drop the meat in on string.
The red blue sinews...