Biography

Geraldine Green’s first collection The Skin was published 2003, her second, Passio, 2006, (both by Flarestack). She performs widely in the UK & USA, also Italy and Greece, including the Bowery Poetry Club, NYC, River to River Festival, Beacon NY, The Woody Guthrie Festival, Okemah, Oklahoma; Wordsworth Trust Grasmere, Everyman Theatre Liverpool, Dylan Thomas Centre Swansea, Women’s International Arts Festival Cumbria and Poetry on the Lake, Orta Italy. Her poetry is widely published in magazines and anthologies in the UK, Italy and America. She teaches Creative Writing at The University of Cumbria and for Continuing Education at Lancaster University, where she is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing Poetry; runs Creative Writing workshops, has worked with musicians, visual and digital artists and photographers and is an Associate Editor of Poetry Bay. She lives in Cumbria, happy among sheep muck and rain.

Samples

SHE WORKED

she lost her husband in '93
she lost her husband in '93
she worked sweeping floors
she worked grinding her hips
in front of beer-drinking men
so her son could go to college
so her daughter could have pretty shoes
she worked washing dishes at greasy sinks --
bars diners high school cafeterias
watched shiny faced girls
on prom night swing
past with their
crop-haired boys,
shy or balls tight across
the dance floor hipping it with
the girls the girls the giggling girls
air hot with sex, she watched them from
the kitchen door while the boys ferried the pretty
girls around the dance floor like a destroyer with a yacht attached to it
she liked that thought she always wanted to be a poet
she thought about poetry she went back to
the pots and pans the smell of grease

she never earned enough

that phrase was a mantra to her
she worked so fucking hard!

she never earned enough

****

UNDER TODAY

lying in bed, me here, dreaming of lost happiness. thinking of the sad faced girl who wants me to dye my hair purple. thinking of soft rosettes, patiently sewn onto children's blankets by deft fingers of headbent women. blanketed babies with bright button noses, snug as the larvae of tent caterpillars. me, lying here under heavy clouds, a memory pressed down, pinning me to the bed

and i can't move and i get to thinking what it would be like to be dead and alive at the same time in a coffin and how i'd like a bell tied to my forefinger like the victorians, so if i was dead and alive my finger would twitch and scare the shit out of some poor sod walking through the graveyard listening for owls, hearing instead the sound of my forefinger ringing and i get to thinking as i lie here watching heavy clouds line up against the sides of mountains, of the time i peered over a sandstone ridge up high somewhere in the inscrutable place where earth meets sky

and i looked down on a pale green river. watched cattle bathing. heard the sound of a thousand voices singing, let's all gather at the river and how their voices shook the sandstone ridge and the great blocks of arizona desert thrown up by a puking god drunk, on his own creation and how i scuttled back from that bloodred ridge. heard the first block of stone clatter down to the river belly floor heard the stampede of cattle whoosh of the river grown into a flood like a pregnant woman's broken waters

and how that sad faced girl with her pale blonde hair took me by the hand to some other place beneath the insistent cloud, to copper mines worked day and night by chinese immigrants, quick and tired with grey-dusted faces and i go to my dressing table, pick up the ear rings bought in albuquerque, wonder whose hand hit the copper seam that made them.

whose hand pale juanito
whose hand chang-ying
whose hand nizhoni
whose hand sabia dearest?

***

me and Janine, vickers shipyard, barrow-in-furness, 1973

legs swinging us licking ice creams on the sub dock
our platform shoes cool and wonderful and the men
whistling and shouting hey love, gi'e us a lick!
and when we turned and gave them you know a
sidelong look they laughed but me and janine we
knew they didn't mean anything by it they were just
joshing so anyhow we sat there with our ice creams
trickling down the side of the cones golden and crisp
the flakes falling onto our mini skirts and we knew
we'd have to go back in soon but the day was warm
it was warm it was summer and we were seventeen
we looked good and we knew it and we loved it when
the sailors came in foreign submariners from argentina
israel middle east and russia listening to their funny accents
and they came here to vickers to board their subs and
them other subs being built alongside our own revenge
and resolution and them going on patrol in the baltic or
the pacific and me and janine dreaming of smuggling
ourselves on board to wake up in a foreign port
somewhere which was just about when the hooter
would go and we had to go back in to our dusty offices
on the sub dock with the sun blocked out and tippex and
pens and a deep pile of papers with typos to correct.

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.