Yellow Lamp: First Thursday Poems by Freya & Jason

We return with a third edition of First Thursday Poems! This month, we feature the fabulous Freya Daly Sadgrove and Jason Lingard. There is no guest editor this month and the poems were selected by the Yellow Lamp team, Ash Raymond James and Sarah Krieg.

Carpet Bag Table Flip by Freya Daly Sadgrove

I presume that inside every woman is a table flip

This is because if all the women in me are anything to go by

I mean if all the women in me represent a cross-section

of all women—and I do often feel that I’m every woman,

it’s all in me, like actually

but that may be some sort of symptom—

if all the women in me were your sample population

it would be a certainty that inside every woman is a table flip

so I presume that inside every woman outside me

is a table flip, but I accept that I may be wrong

which is a desirable attribute isn’t it

Some of my friends outside me

tell me they aren’t even interested in screaming

which is one of the things that helps me know

that I’m not every woman

Every woman in me is very

very interested in screaming

My body is a Mary Poppins carpet bag for my scream

My body is a Mary Poppins carpet bag for numerous,

but by no means all, women

(see how sane I am, given time)

Every woman in me is a Mary Poppins carpet bag

for her own scream

and a table flip

My body is a Mary Poppins carpet bag for numerous,

but by no means all, women; my own scream;

and my own table flip

I’m keeping it out of reach

I’m giving it time

Freya Daly Sadgrove is a pākehā writer and performer from Aotearoa, currently living on Gadigal Country. She is the engine behind live poetry extravaganza Show Ponies. She premiered her award-winning poetry-rock show Whole New Woman in 2023. Her first poetry collection, Head Girl, was published in 2020 with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and is currently being adapted for television. @freyadalysad

A poem for my great-grandfather, sculptor Joseph Cribb

A boy from Brighton asked me

what I did yesterday in East Sussex

and I told him I tried to imagine myself

a pile of rubble on the floor of my

great-grandfather’s workshop where he had

carved the inscription on Oscar Wilde’s tombstone.

But I couldn’t. So instead, I rubbed dust into my skin—

a makeshift exfoliant that helped me morph

into the body of an octopus, smooth and free from bones.

I wondered what he would think of me now?

A mouth full of seawater, an ass full of cum.

I know Oscar would be proud, but that’s not the question.

His reply to that story was empty, like the time

I tried crystal meth, or the day after, of trying to go back,

to measure something obscure like the length of a snake,

or the width of a wombat, or the time my mother

found a bag full of kittens on the side of the road.

And that was the first time I realised

that that was something that people did.

Jason Lingard is a writer and designer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. His work has appeared in various journals, including Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, &Change, Troublemaker Firestarter, Circular, Overcom, Rat World, and Tarot

(selected by Ash Raymond James)