Barbican Young Poets 2019-20

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Nuestra Cocina

an incantation for split ends / hechizando para puntas abiertas

Storm Dennis y General Franco
Mi Abuela enviando dinero á la casa de Bernanda Alba

Chicken shops
selling una caña por €1

Tienda de piel
so soft the bread and flesh separate

Porras pouring out of a truck into your mouth
Bags splitting because you’re carrying too much

Ojos mas grande que tu belly
Estates as waves

All around you are boom boxes and Bernard
dancing the ends away

Lying in the marble fountain
drying yourself out in the Whitgift Centre

El sol quemando tus pies
Your primary school strapping itself in gold to cover up the 1800s

Thornton Heath High Street fading into Pastel Brighton
Cyclists and guerilla fairy lighters

How do they feel in your mouth?
Labios de vino

Crunching their soft and their hard between your teeth
Su voz corriendo

Stormzy will return but this time to Boxpark. If you queue long enough
He’ll resurrect your favourite Morley’s with his hands

Los pies sobre el cielo

Sue Perkins Torejas Kate Moss
Paella Rosalia

Try saying this into your mirror tonight
y dime cual manera vienes.

My Mum

is fourteen and the basketball hall is empty, i've made it a wide echoing abyss of a hall for you, she walks in with her squeaky leather shoes in a gingham summer dress, blue, and a sports bomber jacket, she has a fringe, and this is just before she cut her hair because of the boys on the bus, she puts down her boombox, it’s a triumph, she hasn’t marked the vanish, her back isn’t curved, the ceiling’s scaffolding is dying, looking down holding it together, she's stood in front of a mirror, that has opened out at such an angle, she is twenty million into the vast basketball distance, she clicks the button and Elton and Paul and Kate and David and Elvis and Marilyn and little house on the prairie and a slapped wrist reaching for the teapot and the queen’s christmas speech and a spitting tortilla and her first Spanish words all play at once in a cacophony of passed-on-lines that tell her where to move, the hall opens up and she’s splayed and rooted and knotted and whirling and her forty million eyes are catching the beams above her, trying not to break

About Phoebe Wagner

Phoebe is a poet, theatre-maker and facilitator. She published her debut pamphlet The Body You're In with Bad Betty Press in 2019 and runs Crep Project (@crep.project) an arts collective exploring trainer culture with young, working class people. Her work explores the politics in the personal and facilitates dialogue in communities. She’s worked with theatres, arts and community organisations across the UK including the Poetry Takeaway, National Literacy Trust, National Maritime Museum, Omnibus Theatre, Big Rat Studio, TURF Projects, Earwax, Croydon School of Art and Studio3 Arts. She’s an alum of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, Rose Bruford and the BRIT School. She’s from Croydon and currently lives in the Isle of Dogs.

Website: www.phoebewagner.com