Jack Andrew Lenton (b. 1986) flits between the Norfolk coast and London where he works as a writer for the Greenwich Maritime Museum. In 2019, he had a first book published, Kingdom of Mud with Sky Burial press. His work has appeared in Vice Magazine; The Cormorant and Ink, Sweat and Tears and he was nominated for Canterbury Festival’s Poet of the Year in 2017.
Contact: jackandrewlenton@gmail.com
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Utterance
Here, the First Man I look:
names dawn on me, I speak
and all the world is within reach
I call out oak
the word like an axe
slices off a timber limb
I call out fish
the word like a net
plucks it from the stream
I call out water
the word like a river
flows cleanly into my cupped hand
I call out night
the word like a cave
cools me in its deep and calm belly
Cocksure in speech,
I crow out darkness,
but the word
deepens into a bigger blot:
the dark swallows the river
the dark sweeps away the fish
the dark smashes the oak to bits,
even night’s belly expels me
I stumble over my tongue,
words twist out of reach,
looking for a name, I find none.
Sifting blindly through earth
I come to a root and clutch and hug
whispering root root, forever root
Here, a first man, I shiver,
enduring the dark till dawn
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Edith’s Lot
“Flee for your life! Do not look behind you, nor stop anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills, lest you be swept away.”
Genesis 19:17
That night we reached the red
mountain, spluttering up
lungfuls of ash, I thought
I heard my daughter’s voice
cry for me across the plain
but as promised,
I did not turn.
As we climbed the red
mountain, I thought I saw
my daughter’s shape cast
just ahead of me, lit
by the fires of the city,
her molten shadow
breaking over my back
but as promised,
I did not turn.
As we summitted the red
mountain, I thought I felt
my daughter’s hand graze
my shoulder, charred by fire
her softness just beneath
the black, jagged surface
My baby girl. God no.
I could not help but turn
and look and yes, I cried out
when I saw just how much
had been undone, all
we’d ever known. I wept
to douse the city. I wept
and the salt armored me
so I could not turn away.
And now: mother, pillar,
sentinel, I stand watch
over a dead sea, living
in deep time, a stone time.
Dried and cured of all but love.
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On Calvary
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The Fool (Reversed)
The Fool tarot card is numbered 0 (the first) or XXII (the last). On the card, a young man stands on the precipice of a cliff, without a care in the world, as he sets out on a new adventure. He gazes upwards toward the sky (and the Universe) and is seemingly unaware that he is about to skip off a precipice into the unknown. However, here the card is reversed and thus inverted.
Dear Mother,
I’m high again, this tower’s blockhead.
I’ve poled a hundred routes, ringing the room,
wearing out the carpet with my circle-work.
I grow weary watching the world, don’t you?
Nature docs on repeat. I’m at one remove,
screened and still, like the houseflies
frustrating the windowsill, hairy little lives
butting against the invisible.
I flump on the bed repeatedly,
the day drips from my nose.
Do you worry? Don’t. Just listen:
there are paths that open in dream.
Only last night, I evaporated —
steamed into skyline, a cloud of eyeballs,
precipitating through foreign lands:
red deserts, ice floes, forests of pine —
each globe descending saw it all,
like Borges’s Aleph if you will.
Attenborough eat your heart out.
Enwombed, is this a better birth?
Head awash with another Earth?
In this flash flood of fiction,
I’m head tired, my body’s ready to go.
But look, I’ve got to get back,
must dash.
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