Selected Poet #1 – Jen Calleja

This is a new section to the website where I feature the work of a poet that I admire or am interested in, a brief history of who they are, some helpful links and a few examples of their work. This will be, at the very least, a monthly update – each month a new poet, some new to Selected Poems and some who have submitted work before.

To start us off, the first Selected Poet is a stalwart of the website, Jen Calleja.

Jen Calleja - reading at the launch of TEAM earlier this month

I first met Jen when we studied at Goldsmiths College, London, together. Born in Shoreham in 1986, London was not the first big city she lived in, having lived in Munich when she was 18. Fluent in German, much of her work is influenced by German culture, ideas and writers. Before she started writing poems, I knew her prose work – which has been published in several independent magazines.

Likewise, her poetry has been published in some excellent magazines, and one of my pieces features in a copy of No. Zine with her work.  I enjoy her poetry, and I feel that she is honing her poetic voice & style the more she writes. Below are two new poems by her – DIY (about passing those seemingly endless hours spent in huge Do-it-Yourself stores as a child) and The Heavens (a musing of the placement of billboards amongst her home town).

Enjoy her work. Some useful links to more of her published works can be found at the end of this post.

DIY

When we were children
my brother and I would visit
DIY warehouses with our dad
to be shown the greasy teeth of cashiers
cooing at our eyelashes flapping like flags
where sawdust settled on them in the queue.

We had interest enough only for the shelf of tester telephones
and the wall of homefront ornaments
shaking hands with doorknobs
highfiving doorknockers
choosing which door to come home to from a
rail of confrontational wooden curtains.

We would use four fingers for that satisfying snap of
lightswitches
to turn off America
start our car in the carpark
bring people back from the dead.

We’d mash the stiff keys of phones
dialling the number for home though we were all out
and the display said we were eternally calling ‘John’,
enjoying the goodbye from either end of the aisle on
mismatched receivers, and I would imagine his voice
deeper, troubled,
out of sync with the boy’s ridiculous little mouth.

M.M.

we ate a fragrant paper chrysalis of cherries,
the waste-plate of stalk and stone debris
a side-dish of spaghetti
in the darkened room, where mugs of
gone-cold Earl grey, with a
winter’s broken ice, or
smashed mirror
floating on their upturned
kaleidoscope’s lens of a
surface, are pools that we talk about
girls over.
when girls dye their hair red
there’s going to be
trouble for the rest of your life.
both these girls sit next to us in the dark
but when they’re ten and bratty.

the one day we needed photography
a crowding sticky mist decided to push passed us by the sea,
crisping up my skin and hair
(who both feigned indifference
to not seem affected or offended).
there’s a chip of glass like a grain of salt
where I crouch half cheering half abusing you while you
ride your bicycle at stirring carrier bags that are
really birds.
if a pigeon did get chewed up in your bike chain
you’d regret your aim.

Issue 1 of Team Magazine, including new prose work by Jen Calleja

Effortless Rex

Sweating up a newspaper in a damp armpit
I check the rim of my hat with a pinky for icicles,
barely touching it: a thumb reading a blade
at the close of splitting an apple.

Snow tires on wet metal railings
Snow catches in the dipping thoroughfare
Snow is destined over vents in the road
to implode like my patience with a succession of thunderclaps coming

from the blustering gauze sails of the building I’d, just then, exited.
I whistle with them, the waterproof coat
of the guts of construction spidering the walls,
and subsequently cough.

You both show up, late.
Who declared me ‘irresponsible’
to the authoritative windows of the place?
Livid, I puckered up for a kiss: ‘Not possible’.

Poor Peacock

Peacock you peck red rubber bands from pavements where
Postmen spill them in the street, counting out the population,
One band for every house,
Enough to string a shoebox guitar a day.
You’ve taken to holding my hand out in the street and
When you pluck up the vellum rings
I stoop too, to watch you dearly.
I swear I’d not seen a single rubber band in the street before
But now they’re all I see.
Buttons, pins, plastic fish, a valid rail ticket,
Even an earring wave up at me.
You couldn’t make it, so I squatly sat where ukuleles are strummed
And restrung with garroting wire,
Never to keep familial correspondences together.
Each ‘lele is a veritable variation of tension, just like the
One red rubber band around my wrist,
A different one each day, one day at a time,
Each a keepsake of a new grip;
One’s like a finger and thumb, gently leading
One’s always asking me like a feathery query
One checked my pulse so hard I shot it out the window
Hoping it would hit the future out of hiding.

The Heavens

In the summers we
eyed folks hunting for
those ad-ver-tised bottles of water
on the neighborhood.
It drove us to sing out,
call out to each other,
to the people.
We wished them luck,
checked if we could sip from
the grail too.

The winters made us quiet,
hushed up our mouths.
No one looked for nothing,
it was all here,
all your questions answered,
the most simple things out of reach ‘til the
roads opened up again.

The billboards were just
postcards from
places we were sure
weren’t anywhere at all.

Useful links for Jen Calleja

Jencalleja – Her website, which features an often updated blog about her new writings.
Team Magazine – a new magazine which features some prose work from Jen
No.Zine – a limited series of magazine which features her poetry and prose