This selection, chosen by guest editor JJ Rowan, is from A Spotter’s Guide to Invisible Things by Laura Theis (Live Cannon Poetry Ltd. 2023).
Six Things Taygete Had To Learn Without Being Taught
I. how to scream
as a doe you have
no voice to speak of
but you can still make a soft
snorting noise when alarmed
you may even still sing
when in love
a kazoo rasp crossed with a rusty screen
door in the wind
II. how to be beautiful while unconscious
don’t
it isn’t
safe
III. how to be a moon
be fallow
elusive
but as sharp as a
shard of a god’s heart
know the meaning
of fawning
make sure you aren’t
followed
here and then here
and then gone
IV. how to rest
fold all four legs into a nest of moss
under the hazel branches
or slow dance along the night
sky with your sisters
learn what you can
from the comets
anyone who knows what it means to be hounded
knows how to be a star
V. how to hunt and be hunted at the same time
the stars understand
it’s never easy to tell the prey from the goddess
the goddess
advises
you need to be fast
you need to be less
of yourself than everyone else
only this will help you be quicker
a) on your feet
b) than him and his lightning
ask all six
of your sisters
remember the wisdom
of comets
here and then here
and then gone
Laura Theis writes poetry, songs, and fiction in her second language. She received a Distinction from Oxford University’s MSt in Creative Writing. Her work appears in journals such as Poetry, Oxford Poetry, Mslexia, Magma, Rattle, and Strange Horizons, and has been widely anthologized by Candlestick Press, Broken Sleep Books, Pan Macmillan, and Aesthetica, amongst many others. Her Elgin-Award-nominated debut how to extricate yourself, an Oxford Poetry Library Book-of-the-Month, won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize. Her collection A Spotter’s Guide To Invisible Things won the Live Canon Collection Prize and received the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors.
JJ Rowan is a queer nonbinary poet and dancer whose writing and movement practices have developed largely out of collaborative approaches and the pursuit of deep connection. They are looking for the places where the written line and the lines of the moving body intersect, where genre blurs and remixes and reboots, and where style and role reach maximum fluidity and deeper capacity. Their chapbook, a simple verb, is available from Bloof Books. You can follow their handwriting and movement projects on Instagram.
