He gets up and goes into the bathroom,
I lie there
window breeze on my eye-lids
still as painting now my breath not enough to steam a mirror
I think of all women through the ages who have lain still like this
afterwards
caught on canvas or memory
or lost now
empty and free
filling that moment
feet warm at last
Bio: Charlotte Oliver is a writer who lives in Scarborough, Yorkshire. She was the commissioned poet for BBC Radio York’s Make a Difference campaign and her work have been published widely. She has poems upcoming in Cape Magazine’s Bitches Get Stuff Done, Green Teeth’s Yorkshire Anthology, Black Bough’s Winter edition and Ice Floe’s Pandemic Love Anthology. She tweets at @charlotteolivr
Q1: When did you start writing and first influences?
Charlotte: I started writing poetry as a little girl, inspired by my mum and my grandma reading delicious rhyming poems aloud to me, like The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes – that one used to thrill and terrify me, and I loved it! I carried on until after university but stopped as life got busier and I’ve only returned to it in earnest this past year.
Q2: Who are your biggest influences today?
Charlotte: Most recently, Roger Robinson, Wendy Pratt, Tony Curry, John McCulloch, Clare Shaw, Robert Frede Kenter, Anna Saunders and Elisabeth Kelly. They’ve all written incredible words that never seem far from my thoughts at the moment.
Q3: Where did you grow up and how did that influence your writing?
Charlotte: I’ve lived in Liverpool, London, Suffolk and Brazil but Scarborough has always been my true home and I adore it; the sea, the tourists, the ghosts of its grand past, the empty beach in Winter – it is endlessly inspiring!
Q4: What do you consider your most meaningful work you’ve done creatively so far?
Charlotte: Always the poems I have written for my husband.
Q5: Any pivotal moment when you knew you wanted to be a writer?
Charlotte: I’ve always been creative but the crunch came a few years ago when I was sitting at my desk job in the NHS. I knew I was losing myself and my excitement at the world (and everything I could see was beige!). I heard myself resign and here I am, poorer but fulfilled.
Q6: Favorite activities to relax?
Charlotte: Being outdoors, preferably by or in the sea.
Q7: Any recent or forthcoming projects that you’d like to promote?
Charlotte: I’m very exited to have had a poem accepted for Ice Floe Press’s Pandemic Love and Other Affinities anthology which will be out later in the summer. I’ve also got a few other things out there that I am hoping for news of very soon…
Q8: What is a favorite line/stanza from a poem of yours or others?
Charlotte: My poem Bee, starts ‘Flying crumb of tiger’. I’m proud of that.
Q9: Who has helped you most with writing?
Charlotte: Wendy Pratt’s (@wondykitten) courses and mentoring has been invaluable to me, as has the Word Central gang’s warmth and welcome each month at their Zoom poetry evenings. Every act of connection with the lovely poetry community has helped me move forwards and, of course, my ever-patient and wonderful husband.
Bio: Charlotte Oliver is a writer who lives in Scarborough, Yorkshire. She was the commissioned poet for BBC Radio York’s Make a Difference campaign and her work have been published widely. She has poems upcoming in Cape Magazine’s Bitches Get Stuff Done, Green Teeth’s Yorkshire Anthology, Black Bough’s Winter edition and Ice Floe’s Pandemic Love Anthology. She tweets at @charlotteolivr
The Cleaning of My Heart
A big suction slurp and a pop as her bran tub-reach retrieves
my memory of tutu dolly lying on the aubretia –
pink&green&purple – such beauty only paralleled to
my kitten self by mum, hair tonged and eyes shadowed blue. A
quick wipe over, she stuffs it back down to the bottom, and blind
fingers stumble on, sliding over and through decades of me
heaped on top of each other like a bucket of shells. She
pulls out shapes and colours, some unrecognisable for a
moment, others accessed more recently – the temperature
of grandpa’s hands, the clatter of the button tin, loneliness.
Some have fused from long association so she
handles them more carefully, others are just crumbs – microscopic
starbursts filling dark spaces between – which she gathers up
in a metal tray and empties straight back in. I am surprised
by how many pairs of shoes have found their way inside it, a
structure I surely should reserve for things that matter more, warm
shame as I remember there are shoes I have loved more than
some people but after a good polish, they sit back in
more comfortably. She lays a lot of what she finds out on the lawn,
so many neat rows of reasons for who I am that after a
while I am giddy and light, an empty plastic bag
waltzing with the wind through an endless sky.When she has cleaned
and replaced everything, I realise that there is room for more.
Bio: Charlotte Oliver is a writer who lives in Scarborough, Yorkshire. She was the commissioned poet for BBC Radio York’s Make a Difference campaign and her work have been published widely. She has poems upcoming in Cape Magazine’s Bitches Get Stuff Done, Green Teeth’s Yorkshire Anthology, Black Bough’s Winter edition and Ice Floe’s Pandemic Love Anthology.
She tweets at @charlotteolivr
Wolfpack Contributor: Charlotte OliverA Fevers of the Mind Quick-9 Interview with Charlotte Oliver
Nobody knew that deep within her there lived a tiny bird.
She felt its wing against her sternum the tips of its thrumming feathers on the dull xylophone of her ribs.
Sometimes the fluttering was so fast she felt as if it was trying to escape the protection of its bony cage and she wondered what would happen if it burst out – where would it fly to and how would it survive?
The gentle rhythm of pedaling her bike through an – orange Autumn day seemed to calm it and it fell asleep entirely when she rocked her babies close or listened to his snores in the velvet silence of the night.
As Perseus
Time passes and my careful choice of tools (pen, inclination, mood) is cast aside replaced by bare hands, fingernails grow filthy clawing through layers of life to deep memories dead skin cell chrysalids, paper-thin, unused. Some I smile to view, others even now are pink raw-nerved, best left until time has scarred skin over double-thick. My experience a stretched wide ribbon of textures, smells and sounds, now framed and gallery-hung, I pass by like a visitor, stand and stare, find details I’ve never seen before. I force my gaze through taut surface into frozen moments of happiness and pain, a surgeon opening my own heart, and am surprised by how much more I can stand and how strong I feel to shape them afresh with scoured words barbed wire tears help me to better feel the soft warmth of gentle-pillowed peace.
You May Write Me Down in History
(first line from Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise)
You may write me down in history and my averageness will strike a discordant note/clang in the harmony of greatness like a stone in a sieve of sunset lentils, or the grit in a glowing sea of pearls without which they would not be there at all.
You may write me down in history, a brown crumb of Christmas pudding in a pile of shiny coins, immortalised for keeping the house quite clean, feeding others adequately, being satisfactory, no prize specimen, rarely picked but necessary so others can shine brighter.
Perhaps if you write me down in history others destined for the middle will be glad to see that their lives have precedents, connections and are necessary colours for the spectrum. They can be satisfied and not have to chase a dream.
Bio: Charlotte Oliver is a writer who lives in Scarborough, Yorkshire. She was the commissioned poet for BBC Radio York’s Make a Difference campaign and her work have been published widely. She has poems upcoming in Cape Magazine’s Bitches Get Stuff Done, Green Teeth’s Yorkshire Anthology, Black Bough’s Winter edition and Ice Floe’s Pandemic Love Anthology. She tweets at @charlotteolivr
Fevers of the Mind 