Bio
Bethany (Bee) Stiana Patience
Performance
poet, marketer, founder of ‘Run Your Tongue’ spoken word night, and Charles
Bukowski devotee. Bee graduated with first-class honours in Creative and
Professional Writing from the University of Nottingham. Following a brief
period working as a poet in schools, she has since moved into the fast-paced
world of marketing, where she’s able to use both the left ‘logical’ side of her
brain and the right ‘creative’ side. Inspired by people and places, Bee’s work
focuses heavily on the five senses, and she believes that every word counts.
Her ultimate aim is for readers and listeners to see, hear, smell, taste, and
feel her poetry. Bee also happens to be the 2012 Nottingham Poetry Society Slam
first prize winner.
Poetry
Written in response
to a poem called ‘Song for Bethany’ by the late Graham Joyce; a fabulous mentor,
an incredible author, and an insanely missed friend.
for Graham
life tasted like candyfloss
rolling ourselves in rizlas of earth
joining freckles like dot-to-dot across
shoulders and collar bones
imagining cartoons and unicorns
onto skin
pulling
thorns
and arrowheads and bluebirds from chests
stabbed breath
twenty-nine reckless
glasses of wine
then coming up Sunday
aching gazes down stranger’s spines
unmarking red lines
under empty cigarette packets
and double-decker wrappers
what do they know?
what do I know?
standing in love with another
not falling
promising not to let them hurt me
as much as the first
or the second
or the third
pulling thorns
and arrowheads and bluebirds from my chest
underneath my tongue
broken guitar strings
are buzzing
like heavy rain on the sunroof of a car
like standing on the edge of a platform when a train goes past
I’ll use lowercase for every single word
so that each letter knows their worth
and I will write
I will write
I will write
I will write
and listen
to the sound of
rules
tearing
themselves
up
He Didn’t
Want to be a Victim
What did you carry?
Anything –
flick knife, lock knife, butterfly knife –
How can something so beautiful
share its name with something so...
Why?
I didn’t want to be a victim. I’ve seen
things, lost things.
The whisper of prison missed my ears beneath
the shouting streets.
A slap on the wrist – I can handle that
then he’ll fall back into
concrete embraces,
continue to subsist in a
vulnerable bubble of kindred pretences
choosing
violence, over conversation
Because they
live in another post code?
Their skin’s a different colour to yours?
Or you can’t pronounce their surname?
I didn’t want to be a victim.
I didn’t want to be anybody’s victim.
We can’t harmonise with a handshake.
Peering from my back pocket, hidden in my
jacket
the blade
boasts protection, saves face in
front of connections
better to arm yourself with a weapon, denote
intimidation
than be a victim.
Victim?
I didn’t want to be a victim.
I didn’t want to be anybody’s victim.
We can’t harmonise with a handshake.
And now all I see are these walls
eats and sleeps a metre away from
his toilet –
it disgusts him. The drip
drip
drip
of the sink,
syncs with the thud of his heart and the blink of his eye
as
he tries to forget
the encounter of my shank with their skin
puncturing layers of cotton,
cells, tissue
flesh tearing
at the point of his knife
and the life
that taints his iron hand
that can’t be washed away with peroxide.
Unnoticed,
until
around half
past seven, eight o clock
he’s there.
Just there
A lost
receipt for a packet of wine gums
an elderly
leaf, shrivelled
beneath your
foot
Look.
The stranger
captured in the background of your photograph
Always there
wrapped in
damp, last
month’s shirt, rolled in tobacco
as if he
grew from a seed of ash in the air
you stare
at this
1900s circus beast
but it’s you
who paints a smile on your face.
A naked head
hides
under the
peak of a cap
his hair
lost
years ago
to a
receding hairline
along with
everything else.
Both hands
placed below his chest
his
fingertips kiss
earth’s cast
offs trapped
under his
nails
his hands
offering
a bouquet of
decaying fruit
‘Excuse me?
I don’t suppose you’ve got forty-six pence?’
He glances
at the change cradled in his palm
‘I’m just
short and I need to get a bottle of pop?’
For a
heartbeat, you panic
smell
diesel, taste metal, hear train brakes
barbed wire
pricks your spine
then
you think, he needs
more than a bottle of pop
Two small
spheres of black ice, too close together
look at you
wait
‘Uh no,
sorry-’
Before
you’ve finished, he’s turned away
as if swung
by a gust of wind
zig-zagging
through the blind
unnoticed,
until
he asks them
He’s asked
me three times – twice
in the same
night, once
He’s there,
always there. Just there
He mustn’t
have remembered me.
I remember
him.
