the red room

Answers to the Questionnaire for Life and Virtue
Goon pillow, burgundy-stained kitchen garden. No.
Scarcely. That rock pool kiss—seashell teeth and slug tongues.
She believed her life was calcifying.Yes, no.
I certainly don’t want to lose him, she’d repeat.
Owning it as the sea does stones. Only during
periods of bruxomaniacal silence.
Fear of pain made her faint in a plane [...]

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This poem
This poem does not belong to me.
It rides on the smile of the postman.
As his clipped cuffs brush the chain
his wheels purr up your street.
This poem does not belong to me.
It is lost in the postman’s satchel,
a letter that has no signature,
a butterfly sealed in its cocoon.
This poem does not belong to me.
If you [...]

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El Prado
A damp morning, just a touch nippy
for January. You’re here
in this indoor meadow, this art-house barn,
randy for epiphany,
or at least hoping to be surprised.
So Raphael’s Transfiguration
is certainly dramatic –
in fact, quite literally uplifting.
So why does that boy agoggle
at Christ levitating leave you cold?
Thirty-five years ago with a head
full of Gormenghast, Seventh
Seal, Crow, the Velvet [...]

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Afternoon with Jane
Being a friend, Jane said, ‘You’re
the whole package!’
No one had ever
called me a package
before. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m a package,
of sorts.’ Or I hoped to be one,
one day – bundled together, on
my way.
Jane said, ‘Don’t be silly,’ and was beautiful
in the high-backed chair, wearing her enormous black skirt
and crinkly leather boots (like [...]

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A Poem to Text to your Friends #1
This is a long winded way to say / how bird song clear your voice / bounds singing / out the window like sixty winged acrobats / that spin flips and cartwheels.
A Poem to Text to your Friends #2
The new sky is blue /a pale blue with icy [...]

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Sam Sampson was born in Auckland, New Zealand and grew up in South Titirangi, next to Little Muddy Creek. Everything Talks, his first collection of poems, was published by Auckland University Press (NZ), and Shearsman Books (UK) in June 2008. It won the Jessie McKay NZSA Best First Book of Poetry at the 2009 Montana New [...]

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I have become one of the thirty editors for the Tuesday Poem which is an blog curated by Mary McCallum and Claire Beynon. The blog is a “hub for poetry, highlighting a single poem every week as worthy of reader attention, and then sending readers off to discover a host of other poems in the blog [...]

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