Rocksong E-Book

Golnoosh Nour

• Herausgeber: Verve Poetry Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 56

Beschreibung

'Rocksong is a shamelessly baroque ride through the all nadirs and summits of the contemporary queer. It's a decadent book, where decadence isn't a cipher for self-indulgence, but a fierce and fugitive resistance. As Audre Lorde writes 'We survived and survival breeds desire for more self'. Or, in the glowing neon precincts of Rocksong, more selves, plural. These poems flirt and confront in turns, they seduce and attack, they are tender and grotesque. They create a strangely exultant burlesque on identity, sexuality, desire and language. I love them for that.' Fran Lock

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Golnoosh Nour is a poet, prose writer, and lecturer. She’s the author of The Ministry of Guidance and other stories – shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2021. Her work has also appeared in Granta, Spontaneous Poetics, and Columbia Journal amongst others. She has co-edited Magma 80 and an anthology of contemporary queer writing forthcoming from Muswell Press.

https://www.gnour.com

Twitter: @DrNourrr

PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

https://vervepoetrypress.com

[email protected]

All rights reserved

© 2021 Golnoosh Nour

The right of Golnoosh Nour to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

FIRST PUBLISHED OCT 2021

Printed and bound in the UK by ImprintDigital, Exeter

ISBN: 978-1-912565-62-7

ePub ISBN: 978-1-913917-74-6

For anyone who gets it.

CONTENTS

BASS (Songs of Home)

Sculptures

The Wicked Capital

Mother Murder

Hiraeth

Sometimes Our Persona Melts in the Sun

My Mother Is My Lover

In Your Arms I Am A Boy

Through A Screen Darkly

Cat Worship

VOCALS (Songs of Desire)

Dream

Psychosis

The Leather Sun

Game

introvert schizo is a #mood or Cheap Plastic Thoughts

Cut-up Boy

Lovesong

Bastard

Made Up

Attitude

Hologram

Boy Museum

Lost Cult

Eye of the Storm

DRUMS (Songs of Selves)

Ode to Self

A Peacock Is a Poem

Infected Parrot

Texting the Teenage Self

The Cruelty of Impatience

I Am Ash on Wednesdays

Euston Station

Cliff Trip

Ritual

Blood Days

Bad News

This Is A Painting Called Motherhood

Sunlit Suicide in the Bathtub

Smoke Sky

RAGESONG

A Manifesto: The Future Is Queer

Acknowledgements

ROCKSONG

BASS(Songs of Home)

Sculptures

but why do I have to explain.

why can’t I just wear

my blue lipstick and be ironic

artsy and eccentric. why do

I have to remind them what they’ve

done to my land, or why sanctions

are bad. why do I have to

be the teacher rising from the grave

of Politics. why should I be the one shouting

we need transgression, darling, not progression

as though I were the chosen one

why did I consume my youth in

sad universities to confirm what I knew

all along. to tediously intellectualise

my instinct – when I could have spent

this time burning a bank, or a church, or even a mosque

where dollar prays that queers will die.

why do I have to explain

why a lunar boy in a dress who murmurs

my art hardens his nipples makes my cunt

jump. why do I have to justify?

why can’t I just open

The Picture of Dorian Gray, page 155

‘To define is to limit.’

and just stare as though I am gazing at

Basil’s painting – but instead

I am the one ageing. why do I have to inform

my father of my sex life when my mother

the sculptor, carved my flesh for years

so I’d be as cultured as her dusty library, but she made

me a bruised slut. why did I desire her

dead like the ultimate Freudian cliché so

I could have my father to myself. but now

that she’s gone, my father and I

are still apart, cutting each other, yielding blood

and we both think the fox that visits

my girlfriend’s garden is my mother.

The Wicked Capital

Tehran means reading never-ending Russian novels under my duvet,

glitterless gay parties until the morning Azan, until the birds scream,

mahogany cafés serving cinnamon tea and vanilla I scream,

Tehran is smoke and fury. It is fuming.

Tehran is static traffic, it is also fenugreek,

all-girl schools, all-boy love, and compulsory hijab,

and the evergreen Shahid Beheshti University where we exchanged

gay kisses but gay did not mean happy, it meant

homo whore harassed faggot corrupt beautiful.

The university whose rules we shattered in our attempts to

become Lord Byron. A garden that is still shining, a neon

green sun in the north west of Tehran that inhaled our ashes, while we

smoked our youth and spat colonial classics, empowering ourselves.

(Now the question is: Will we ever be truly empowered? We,

the despondent snobs from the top universities of Iran, who ended up in the bottom

universities of Brexitland, Dumpland, The North Pole, doing degree after

degree after degree so we/they can forget our skin colour and forgive

our accent even though we are pale like four, and quiet

like infected parrots, will we ever be empowered?)

In Tehran we are still powerless, even though

it is officially our homeland: our sealess port.

Tehran, the harbour of pollution where fast cars screech

American pop in ambivalent alleyways paved with martyrs’ blood.

I have never seen a city capable of containing so much love and hate.

Tehran is my parents and our house,

my siblings and my best friend, his passion

for beautiful boys and avant-garde theatre, and the scenario

of our eternal escape. Tehran is my grandmother,

cherry pickles that she made just for me with specifically

rotten sour cherries that surprisingly tasted like god,

her God, that was not my god, and became a gap that devoured our love.

Tehran is my real room, my bookshelf, my vanity table, crowded

with bottles of blue varnish – my first rainbow fag.

Tehran is aromatic; herbs, saffron, dried lime,

turmeric, salt, bloody beans, red meat, brown flesh.

After Persian cuisine, nothing tastes great.

Tehran is Arabic prayers and Persian poetry:

Bookshops floating in the sizzling summer streets:

Forough Farrokhzad, Sohrab Sepehri, and Sadegh Hedayat, but also

preposterous books such as bad translations of

American self-help and Mein Kampf.

Everything for a cheap price! And the everlasting question:

How can this country survive when Hedayat

killed himself and Forough died at such a young age?

Tehran is fear. More wars, more sanctions, more inflation.

The morality police. Our government, the US government, Saudi Arabia,

and the government of Israel. Fear of all the governments, and fear of more chaos.

Fear of expenses. Fear of being stuck. Fear of leaving. And of returning.

Fear of missing. Fear of losing and fear of winning.

Fear of anarchy, and love of anarchy.

And love.

Living in Tehran is like being in love with the villain

everyone judges and wonders why, but one will not

lower oneself to explain the attraction.

The moment anything is justified, it becomes boring, common, worldly.

This is why when people ask where in Iran I am from,

I respond, the wicked capital,

saturated with gold oil, dripping with black glory,

come in but stay out, so you won’t regret it.

Mother Murder