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Recently, thanks to a very helpful librarian called Emily, we were listed on the Scottish Poetry Library's 'Collections' page – an excellent resource for both poetry readers and writers. Similar listings with the Southbank Centre and Poetry Ireland have followed (thank you to both Lorraine and Elizabeth!) These listings will hopefully help to spread the word about The Crunch a little further, and we really appreciate the time spent by these very busy people to add us to their websites. Please do check them out – all three organisations do a lot of good work in the name of poetry. A by-product of these listings is that we're now eligible to nominate three poems for The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Exciting times! The deadline for nominations is the end of this week, with the prize awarded at a ceremony in London on 21 September 2017. We've just posted off our nominations – here are our chosen three: An Amateur's Guide to AstronomyTonight is hysterical with stars. Light and memory: both needle through from the past. In this bay, we were equally combustible. One lunatic electron is enough to ignite bodies. I remember you in charted galaxies. Andromeda's arms. Your hands on my waist; the startled particles between. Gravity. When you pulled me into the February sea, we were nebulous. Light and memory. Constellations apart, we scuttle our feet under different waves. How to tease the sea from the moon's leash? Alan Kellermann The Crunch Issue #3 MedeaI stand in the bedroom, sweatless. I admit to the dagger, the rage and the kids who looked like you; had the eye of the cool Aegean with Argonaut bravado and a traitor’s blood. Our babies. I nursed them with love and a knife to save them from sins like you— our lullabied young. Like you, they were forked in the tongue. But I was once young, a charming girl, head over claws in love with you-- protective, faithful as any good angel, my Colchis light bleaching a brother’s bones. You could say I became obsessed. I had you possessed but Corinth tore us apart. Still, I can’t resist revenge, death knell shaking the house to its dead foundations, the children’s gasping surprise; oh, the look in your eyes when you found them, coiled like little white worms or the curl of a gorgon’s hair. She may be princess but I am a queen, Medea-- monster maternal, with blood in my breasts and a glint in my milkwhite eye. Revenge is a kick in the womb. Natalie Ann Holborow The Crunch Issue #4 The BayThe merry-go-round played out with grim enthusiasm as we passed by, the skirt of our black umbrella angled against the wind. We were the only people walking the promenade of empty chain restaurants devoid of charm. Latin music piped out through crummy speakers, a delusion of a summer holiday somewhere hot, somewhere else, somewhere not here. Yet the chairs stacked up against the walls dripped with rain and we huddled together to keep warm. I bought you chips to eat in the salted sea air, vinegared with a sharp gull’s cry, and from the jetty we watched tourists venture out onto the platform, take a photo, clouded by the dark sky, and scuttle away like insects, enduring little of the chilly British weather. In the distance the merry-go-round played but still did not turn. That night we drank the world and rolled heavily into bed, murmured of making babies between things unsaid. Rebecca Parfitt The Crunch Issue #5 The winner of The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem receives £1000, with all other poems nominated also considered for an anthology of the year's best poetry. Good luck to Alan, Natalie and Rebecca!
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