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).
in my mother tongue the name for grand piano is wing
in my mother tongue
words can be feathered
which turns them into
old jokes or proverbs
owning a bird
in my mother tongue
is a sign of great madness:
you can accuse someone
with an outrageous opinion
of cheeping and chirping
if you want to convey
that you are flabbergasted or awed
in my mother tongue
you might say: my dear swan
which is what I think
when I first hear you play
as your fingers move over
the keys I wonder
what gets lost in translation
between music and birdsong
whether both soar above
our need to shift between words
then I remember
in my mother tongue
the name for grand piano
is wing
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.
