Debut collection from UK Slam Champion Sara Hirsch

2. Sara Hirsch is a London-based performance poet with punch.
As a trained actress with a terrible writing habit, she finally put
two and two together in late 2013 and embarked on a career in
spoken word.
Soon after, Sara was crowned UK Slam Champion and
subsequently came third in the World Slam Championships in
2014. She now runs London’s only regular three-round slam as
well as Hammer & Tongue’s newest addition in Waterloo.
Sara has toured New Zealand and headlined events across the
UK including Bristol, Edinburgh, Cambridge, London, Brighton,
Oxford and Manchester. She has performed at Glastonbury and
Latitude and has had her work featured on BBC Radio 2. After
premiering her debut, award-winning solo show How Was It For
You? at the Edinburgh Fringe 2015, Sara embarked on an MA in
Spoken Word Education at Goldsmiths University and currently
works in schools and communities, inspiring and educating
through poetry and performance.
Sara is known for her deeply personal, witty and heartfelt poetry,
for her powerful performances and for her penchant for haikus,
normally involving an awful pun.
In a desperate attempt at self-promotion, Sara is trying to get
more Twitter followers. Let her know what you think of her
ridiculous handle @sarsbars89.

3. Present
I keep my father in the folds of his knitwear.
I keep November in the neckline
and his surname in the colour.
You cannot get a darker green and still call it green.
I remember when I would watch my mother sew his name
into my school uniform, head bent in concentration,
patience threaded into her focus, the likes of which
I wouldn’t know for years. I wore his name with pride.
Carved it cursively onto exercise books,
answered to it in the register, always thankful to be
near the front, never waiting like the Woods or the
Thompsons for my turn to come around.
Atkinson
Bagri
Broydo
Currell
Delaney
Defreitas
Green.
Present,
I would call into the classroom.
Sometimes we would joke, shout things like
Christmas tree or Rudolph, not understanding
that the game was not to name festive things.
That present meant here, that we existed,
that we were proof of us.
Introductions went
Sara, no H,
Green, no E,
just like the colour.
His name would sit on my tongue, heavy,
like extravagant family dinners and Christmas
when everyone was present.
Now it lies printed on my bank card like a secret.
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It is passports and payslips (the other me is self-employed).
I use it only when I have to, like tax avoidance of a past
that no longer fits.
Each November I pull my father out from his drawer,
dust off another year without him and pull his name
over my head.
Sometimes his jumper is a hug.
Sometimes it is strength,
and sometimes just a vintage item
for people to blindly compliment,
unaware that it is not an attempt at fashion.
I tell them it was a present.
That it belonged to someone else before me.
That it is proof that he was.
I wear him through the month he stopped existing
like armour, like a shroud, like evidence.
His jumper is my mood that month.
You cannot get a darker green and still call it green.
I wear him as we approach another Christmas
without his presence, to ward it off, like Scrooge,
like Grinch, I steal back the years, I steal back
my name. I wear it for a while, try it on for size.
It feels like my mum has sewn me into it
and with her patience I make it through the month.
Then he goes back in his drawer, neatly folded, waiting,
like the Woods, for his name to be called.
I keep him waiting.
I keep him in the folds of his knitwear.
I keep November in the neckline
and his surname in the colour.

4. It is almost as if Janet Donaldson
is no longer in Rochester
reeling from her win,
but here, on a squishy chair
in the waiting room,
and she can no longer hold in her joy.
As her voice penetrates the atmosphere
like a badly timed and uninvited smear test,
I almost hear her say,
My name is Janet and I have thrush,
live on air.
The host replies,
Congratulations, Janet!
What will you do with all that thrush?
I think I will use it to give the children
an extra-special Christmas, Janet answers.
I laugh out loud
and a roomful of judgemental strangers
try not to catch my eye.
I look down at my Doc Martens,
smirk to myself
and shyly cross my legs.
And the Winner Is
There is something distinctly unsettling
about sitting in the waiting room at the sex clinic,
avoiding eye contact with a load of strangers
and collectively listening to a woman
win £3,000 on the radio
while we sit
with our symptoms
and our jealousy,
only keeping one
hidden from view.
Let’s be honest, we would all rather be Janet Donaldson
in Rochester right now.
We would all rather be live on air
being told that we will be the unsuspecting recipient
of £3,000, cash,
two weeks before Christmas
and not sat here, squirming
in a Soho sexual health centre.
We would all rather get that phone call,
get that surprise
than anything else
we might have had thrust upon us unawares
two weeks before Christmas.
No one talks in this place.
Almost as if any utterance
would ruin our attempts at anonymity;
one cough and you might as well announce
what is wrong with your vagina
and be done with it.
We don’t speak. We daren’t.
So the voices on Magic FM
interrupting the awkward silence
we had so carefully constructed
seem entirely invasive,
like a sudden audible insertion of a speculum
into our private aura of embarrassment.
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5. Silence.
Conversation stopped.
All of us curious to see
how long it would take
for the proverbial penny to drop.
You sniggered, and the laughter lingered.
I mean, why would you have a ring on your engagement
finger?
The penny took so long to reach the ground
it started collecting interest
and by the time it hit the carpet,
the penny was a pound,
and the pound grew heavy with the weight
of what you’d said and the queen on the front of it
shook her weary head,
but you were still laughing,
although nothing was funny.
I felt the fight kick in, felt your words
stick in me, wanted to stand up and shout
that you sicken me. That you’re talking about
my best friends who through thick and thin
keep me afloat,
but I didn’t want to
step on their toes
so I sat on my words,
I didn’t want to rock the boat.
So we avoided the issue.
But somehow the awkwardness
seemed to entirely miss you,
there was an elephant filling the room
but you were unaware of this, you
didn’t even notice, not even the remotest
hint of an acknowledgement of this.
The Proposal
Any lines in italics should be read in a questionable
Scottish accent.
My two best friends just got engaged.
Over champagne he tells me
how he dropped to one knee.
He tells me how he did everything
traditionally and how the words ‘Will you marry me?’
came out his mouth so perfectly,
and I am so proud of him.
And now my best friends – historically immature,
my best friends – are finally growing up.
I just wish the same could be said for everyone.
Do you remember us?
We met you outside the local pub
quite late last Friday night,
you were the one who’d lost your mates
and stumbled into sight
slightly worse for wear.
But we didn’t care,
you were friendly enough
and when you pulled up a chair
we were more than happy to have you there.
Do you remember when you noticed the ring?
A simple silver band wrapped around the fourth finger
on my friend’s left hand, a promise of a future
that I can’t wait to witness.
Is that an engagement ring?
Innocent enough question.
We laughed and nodded. Yes.
Do you remember what happened next?
Do you remember laughing
and looking down your nose
and saying, Why on earth do YOU have one of those?
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6. New Colleagues
I want to tell you about what happened in the classroom.
In the Wi-Fi-free war zone, where banter is a bully’s best bullet
and battle-cry jibes bounce off tripping tongues
and your best bet is bite back or be broken
by cheap shots and belittling and badly built word bombs.
Boom. And you’re beaten.
Can I tell you about what happened in the classroom?
In the post-break-time zoo where little monkeys
are suddenly free from their cages,
ripping up pages we printed and swinging
from tails of too much sugar
and not enough attention
and best mate primates become incubated irritated inmates.
Where we are suddenly keepers of the worst kind of secret.
Where we are cleaning out the pigsty language
and sweeping stinking statements off the ceiling,
into the mouths of impatient mammals
eager to spit them back out again.
So can I tell you what happened?
Round the table
a dozen doubters gathered.
Student soldiers
studded with swearword scars
and packs of creatures
wild enough to rip your smile off
and swallow it whole.
We lured them in.
Wound nooses of words
round their necks,
alphabeted traps
for them to fall into, unaware.
Drew rope ladder metaphors
in the trenches
for them to climb out
until they were ours.
Then it happened.
First Day in a New Job
The schoolyard is a cemetery of my fear. My worries
are headstone blazers on the backs of computer-game
zombies who haunt my saunter into school. I could
bury myself alive in here. This is no place for a poet.
I need you to grab my hand and drag me through the
schoolyard graveyard after dark. Make me walk my
nightmare. When my footsteps resist, insist they keep
going, crunching over was that a bone? It is never a bone.
It is stick and stone words that break at my boots and echo up
my spine as I climb through the corridors trying to find safety
in staff rooms, cups of cold coffee and the rhythm of the
photocopier, tomb-like in the corner while the ghosts haunt
me, taunt me from their desks. Let me jump at the shadow
of a hundred expectant faces in the murky moonlit hall,
let them all smell my terror. Let it fill them up, let it give them
hope that even grown-ups are afraid of the dark.
Let go of my hand and I will run through the blackboard
night. Past the trees that trip me, past the ghouls that lurk in
doorways waiting for me to pass. Past the buried books that
remind me that I don’t know enough to do this.
Until I start to see glimmers of light in curious eyes that
guide me to safety. Until I remember that everyone wants
their hand held sometimes. That everyone is scared of the
dark before they get used to it,
that everything is a graveyard
until you bury your fear of it.
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