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Fiona Larkin won the National Poetry Competition 2024 with her poem ‘Absence has a Grammar.’ Her debut collection, Rope of Sand, was published by Pindrop Press in 2023. The title poem was highly commended in the Forward Prizes. Her pamphlets are Vital Capacity (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and A Dovetail of Breath (Rack Press, 2020). She has judged poetry competitions for Koestler Arts and The Society of Women Writers and Journalists. Projects with Corrupted Poetry include the staging of live events such as Seed for The Bloomsbury Festival, guest editorship of Finished Creatures, and editing the anthology Living with other people (Corrupted Editions, 2022).
Fiona’s website
Rope of Sand is available from Pindrop Press and Vital Capacity from Broken Sleep Books. (All Rack Press pamphlets are limited editions of 150, and A Dovetail of Breath has sold out.)
NB: You can hear Fiona reading her prize-winning poem, ‘Absence has a grammar’ here
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Fiona Larkin: Eight Poems
WALKING THE HOUSE
after an installation by Do Ho Suh
Each stairwell or hall
is steadily filling
with the breath of arrival,
a balloon skin thinning,
its colour still true.
Vestibules echo
to fuchsia or cobalt.
Cellular tissues
are stitched into shape,
details picked out –
doorbell and letterbox,
chrome and mouldings –
as if everything’s portable,
malleable enough
to shake out next year,
in lilac or lime,
as socket or skirting,
a personal domicile
like a nest or a shell,
no matter the city.
A tally of memories
is sewn in each crease
in a cloister that moves
where you will, aglow
and adrift, weightless
as the best new beginning.
There’s a ration of repose
shining onto the street,
for every home seems happy
at nightfall – every home
that’s animated by light.
BORDERLAND
Enough to walk –
enough to walk, untied
enough to move together side-
by-side to let the words occur, to let
the world occur around. Scrap the table
in between, the stare and all that means, enough
to brush a shoulder, let a misstep cause two
hips to touch. Enough a glance, a glancing
off, at what a plane can teach, what might
be learnt from an edge.
FEVER CHART
Life convulses – a dying fish, caught
on a heaving deck – flips from hatchling
to ice-packed rigour, melting back to haunt
her slippery self. Which is to say that now I haunt
that girl, who crossed the room and caught
your eye one snow-shot night, I love her hatchling
hips, her silver trust, though she’d pierce her hatchling
lip rather than admit such innocence. Haunted
by this outgrown self, gills flood: my thaw is caught.
Touch me again, caught between the hatchling and the haunt.
THE INSTINCT OF PRAYER
in the prayerless
is torn between logic and hope,
where thought becomes breath
and breath demands words
to rise like smoke,
a necessary burnt offering.
A vertical line in clear dawn air
caught by each breeze
exposes the naked
and cowering self.
Uncertain soloist,
the comfort of chorus
patterned in infancy
elicits this sense
of spoken artifice.
Is what you in the plural may chant
what you quite alone can say?
Your rote tongue
hesitates, again.
No harmony here but
discordance.
What to do with this impulse?
What to set alight?
THE DORMANT ORCHID PUTS FORTH A SPIKE
and I can’t help but feed it
something buried, or forgotten
excavates itself and gasps for air
the body leaps to its own conclusion –
the intensive brain must conjugate
but the body doesn’t care about tenses
and never assumes the past is historic
I’m reading novels about nuns again
and ordering inappropriate tops
my conscience plastic-littered, torn
GEORG RIDES THE U-BAHN
‘such is his eye in real life, such is the shape of his cheek’
Holbein’s caption to The Merchant Georg Gisze, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
The Brandenburg gate is tumbling in translucent decals
across each window of the Berlin underground train,
dissolving as shallow tunnel gives way to day-lit platform.
Its repeated motif deters the graffiti, and foregrounds a man,
the spit of his portrait: Georg has slipped from his frame,
dropping his cap of black velvet, his coral-pink sleeves.
He’s rendered slip-shod, padded jacket and denim,
and has learned over years how to sit: in stillness, in silence,
in three-quarter profile. He holds his position, his hands
interlock on his lap as we accelerate, brake, in a cycle of light
and dark. He’s swapped Hanseatic trade for austerity.
No symbols of self hang from the grab rails or shine
from grey vinyl, no handwritten bills, inkstands or seals,
betrothal carnations, the tick of a clock. He’s cut his hair
short, and his unpainted eye is giving back less, doesn’t meet
mine, to demand, have you finished your looking?
Holbein, I observe him the harder because of your claim.
His eye in real life, the shape of his cheek, are criss-crossing
the city, jumping the lines between epochs and borders.
You’re cleaning your brushes: hand him a ticket as he alights
from your easel, his features a permit for infinite transit.
MAINTENANCE
after Louise Bourgeoise
The room seems to tilt,
unsteady to its core,
as a stainless knife
excises the windows.
She sanctioned replacement
but starts at the gasp
of the tripartite bay,
open to air.
All its mouths are agape –
a return to the moment
of birth, the fresh-peeled
cry of the body.
The fault in the glass snags
like a twitch in the eyelid:
femme maison,
must she love what is meant
to improve her?
Her breath on the pane,
how it melted
the build-up of ice
in the bleakest of dawns.
The gaze from outside,
the gaze from within.
And the loss
of all of that looking.
Now she is tight,
laminate-muffled,
crisp in her finish.
She opens and shuts.
She fits in the frame.
She plugs up nostalgia,
its hurricane rattlings,
its whispers and shrieks,
and kills, for a while, what is cold.
ARS POETICA
How the voice can be lost, like a key or a phone
or falter under pressure. Callas’s slow vibrato:
an ache to be heard, a fray of the cords.
How breath on a mouthpiece, a touch on the strings
relies on the player: the go-between body
risks false modulation, sets timing awry.
How beauty is smeared by a smudge on the lens
– a slip of the chisel – a thickness of oil paint
– corruptible colour – a hand with a tremor.
How language attempts to set it all down.
A buzz in the brain flings itself against glass.
‘Walking the House’ is a new poem, in response to the installation ‘Nest(s)’ by the Korean-born artist Do Ho Suh (at Tate Modern until 26 October). ‘Ars Poetica’ is also new. ‘Borderland. ‘The Instinct of Prayer’ and ‘Fever Chart’ can be found in Rope of Sand (Pindrop Press, 2023) and ‘Maintenance’ is in Vital Capacity (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). ‘The Dormant Orchid Puts Forth a Spike’ was published in the first issue of ParadoxLit, a journal which disappeared shortly afterwards, and ‘Georg Rides the U-Bahn’ is in the still available In Transit: Poems of Travel (Emma Press).
The High Window 