I have recently been nominated for the Pushcart Anthology by Red Fez, a small press based in the USA who have published several of my poems. To check out a few previews from my new collection The Dead Queen of Bohemia, please click here – Red Fez, poem The Devil Didn’t Mark You, Those Marks Came From the Man

Here is No Stars Pension in Downtown Cairo, taken from my debut collection Urchin Belle. This is the poem which received the nomination. Below that I’ve posted a few photos from The Berlin Pension, an amazing old building I stayed in, in downtown Cairo. I adored it. It was smelly, decayed, romantically decrepit and showed all the wear and tear of a city in decline since the last revolution. I wanted to move in, live there and write my book. Anyway, here’s the poem and pics, see if you can see the heart that someone had drawn, in the dirt on the wall.

No Stars Pension in Downtown Cairo

The cat yowls at us,
hackles
like a matted
fur collar coat.

It will die in this heat.

Room 453 is ours,
an off green,
shower cubicle in the corner
curtained by lace
that once was white.

Someone has drawn
a heart, in the dirt on the wall.

Tinfoil holds the air conditioner
together, I lay on the bed
think of heroin
an’ cerise,
an angel with dirty feet
in the photograph you take.

Keys in art deco wardrobes
wear dust
an inch thick.

Higher still a gap
gapes into a grin as I sleep.

Down scurry scarab beetles
blues an greens,
through bare
floorboards,
out cracks in the walls.

Cairo has seen this before.

They are here for you and I,
come to pick our bones
clean
of a love
we will soon,
no longer know.

I also received a nomination by Durable Goods, a handmade zine published by Aleathia Drehmer in the US. She is also in the sought after issue 27, as is the Marquis De Ridgwell. Now —  here is Woody Guthrie to tell all you fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do ….