This dress has pockets

By Hannah Swingler

Hannah describes her incredible debut collection of fresh and original poetry best…'I struggle to throw things away. Used envelopes, mostly. This is not only my debut collection of poetry, it is my hoard, my memory bank, my adventure into the known.
'This dress has pockets exudes the feeling of finding a dress that fits in a charity shop for only £4.50 and it has the functionality of pockets that are deep enough to carry unsent love letters and conkers and those memories that you wish you could binge watch, or tape over.
It is ethereal but memorable, surreal, but familiar, like a dream you weren't able to keep hold of. It is what it means to remember, what it means to grow up storing your thoughts close to you, in pockets of dresses that make you look alright until you sit down in them. Now is your time to dance in it, now is the time to empty your pockets and spin.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verve Poetry Press
• Release date: Aug 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781912565757

Hannah Swingler

Hannah Swingler is a poet, teacher and artist, born and bred in Birmingham. She was the winner of CoachesSLAM 2018, as well as coaching the University of Birmingham’s uniSLAM team to victory. She has performed across the country: with Tongue Fu, featuring at Howl, Grizzly Pear, Verve Poetry Festival, Cafe Grande Slam, Stirchley Speaks, and at REP Birmingham, BOM, the Old REP, Ikon Gallery, Upstairs at the Western, Derby Theatre, Oxjam Fest, Birmingham Weekender and mac, amongst others.

Book preview

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hannah Swingler is a poet, teacher and artist, born and bred in Birmingham. She calls a forward roll a ‘gambole’.

She was the winner of CoachesSLAM 2018, as well as coaching the University of Birmingham’s uniSLAM team to victory. She went on to represent the UK at CUPSI in Philadelphia.

She has performed across the country: with Tongue Fu, featuring at Howl, Grizzly Pear, Verve Poetry Festival, Cafe Grande Slam, Stirchley Speaks, and at REP Birmingham, BOM, the Old REP, Ikon Gallery, Upstairs at the Western, Derby Theatre, Oxjam Fest, Birmingham Weekender and mac, amongst others. She featured on BBC radio discussing the importance of poetry for young people.

Hannah is an alumnus of both the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and Beatfreeks YSC.

She believes good things come to those who make.

Twitter: @HannahSwings

www.facebook.com/hannswings

https://hannahswings.com

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PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

Birmingham, West Midlands, UK

https://vervepoetrypress.com

[e-mail]

All rights reserved

© 2019 Hannah Swingler

The right of Hannah Swingler to be identified as author if this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

FIRST PUBLISHED JAN 2019

Printed and bound in the UK

by TJ International, Padstow

ISBN: 978-1-912565-11-5

ePub ISBN: 978-1-912565-75-7

Cover art by Ceren Kilic

For June and Eileen -

The powerhouse women

who always stole the show.

CONTENTS

Freddie Mercury

Graze

Inventory 1

Say my name

I made a sign for the livingroom door (Dance Show)

Like popcorn kernels

Teach Me Shorthand

Kingsway Picturehouse

Blue is a colour

Inventory 2

Good deed

I left the dress you lent me in Spain

Crown Shyness

How you are using

Tailie

Blanket Fort

Snobs (is a sacred space)

Da Vinci

Amy and Tau have squatter’s rights

You took this job because

off

Seating Plan

BSA

Octopus in a Jar

Wash your mouth out

Mrs Tiggywinkle has fallen of the shelf again

Albatross

Greenhouse Glasses

Inventory 3

Rough Terrain

Apocalypse

Onomatopoeia

Dots

Glaciers

The Collector

Muse

At the end of the night

I keep dreaming of

Yet

Que sera

Hannah Introduces Jess Davies, Asim Khan, Hannah Ledlie and Dennis Nkurunziza.

Acknowledgements

This dress has pockets

Freddie Mercury

When I am nine, my parents move us to the countryside, away from bus routes and gang wars. The house they buy is bigger, too cheap for what it offers and their deliberation doesn’t last long. They don’t think to look at the old wiring; block out the sound of the motorway at the bottom of the garden.

Financial recklessness is hereditary.

We continue to go to school in the city, work in the city: be city dwellers that must sleep where we can see the stars clearer. Thirteen miles there, another thirteen back: the car becomes our living room, our bedroom, our home.

It doesn’t have a CD player, so my brother makes jukebox cassettes, one song per family member then repeat. I choose Jesus of Surburbia by Green Day because it is nine minutes and seven seconds long and I crave the attention.

Fields, trees, abandoned farm buildings, hair pin bends, blind junctions, I know the landscape better than the opening to my favourite movie.

I write birthday cards leaning on headrests without curving a line.

               I can apply a full face of makeup using the rear view mirror

from the backseat.

                           I learn to change outfits without flashing the driver.

                                         I devour books like they will be burnt at the

                                                      end of the day.

My brother falls in love with a girl who lives opposite our school. He stays overnight on a camp bed in her living room, I think. He stops making mix tapes. I am given an ipod for my birthday and spend the mornings staring out of the window pretending I am in a music video.

My mother only drives when my Dad is already home. At night, she turns the lights of on roads without cat eyes and we scream in the seconds of darkness, before we flash back to visibility. One night, we drive passed a man in drag walking in the road towards us. Two weeks later, the local headlines talk of a decapitated tranny who got hit by a car on her way home from a dinner party. My Mom stops turning the lights of after that.

Mornings mean minus six degrees and the heater breaks.

I fall in love with a boy who lives opposite my school in an adjacent road to my brother’s girlfriend. I can see my art room from my bedroom window. I stay overnight on a camp bed, sometimes. I’m not sure whether the reason I love him is because I get an extra half an hour of sleep in the morning.

We resurrect Freddie Mercury on a thunder filled October night through a dramatic, unrehearsed yet surprisingly harmonised word-perfect rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody. We congratulate each other on hitting the high notes, swerve to miss a pheasant and