Tommy Sissons

Tommy Sissons is a poet, novelist, playwright and educator based in London. He is the literary editor of GRASS Magazine, a publication specialising in the promotion of working-class creatives. His novel Cautious, A Boat Adrift and polemic A Small Man's England were both published by Repeater Books. Sissons has delivered talks on his work at a number of academic and cultural institutions, including the V&A Museum, University of Chicago Illinois and Sheffield Hallam University. In 2025, he will be the head judge of the Causley Trust's International Poetry Competition and Young Person's Poetry Competition. He has been shortlisted for the Out-Spoken Award for Poetry and his verse has been published in numerous literary journals including The Poetry Review and Northern Gravy.

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OPERATING ON MY FATHER

Full dark belongs to borstal dot and I to dot and borstal dot.

All to be done, the delinquent crouches in molecules. For Indian ink,

he sets alight bones, tars, pitch and other substances.

The blazing school communicates through saturation

and distortion. Dot negotiates all ends, offering only

the snowfield beyond. This was his white flag

of wrath. I remember. He returned as myth with the wound

of inertia at his tear trough. No human in the house but dot,

the silent ever voice of dot, the borstal of his name.

Many bones were burnt that day.

hold still a moment this grotto of the dot I open

dots of rock and rot be still skin borstal

blood-ink perfume notes of star anise, cloves and incense

these natural materials purblind substances

of love stillness now, primal obsidian

hold stillness, beating dot –

I walk through borstal dot to collector canals to veins

to collect. This house of starless optics

which is the dot beyond the dot.

There are so many fires here still left to be surrendered.

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CICATRIX

A scar debates what to name itself. It first asserts

that it is a waterless river, a valley on the face

of my moon. I agree, as soil will concede

to its representative elm. A scar is left at the point of separation

of a frond from its auditorium of life. It wishes to prove

that the wickedness has gone. Scar, secondly,

names itself water. It is the twenty-forth summer

of my redemption and I am buttered with scar

to prove it. I have dispersed what was extracted. Tell no sky.

There are still wars fought over the existence of this.

In the absence of those who once sought

to name it, I hear a scar daring the autocracies

of God. Saddled with recognition, you traced your finger

around the ridge and were as secret as its embankments. Yes,

I am familiar with the silence you let in. It is not unlike

when I was sixteen, and was told that on the youth club trip a horse

had been shot. It was the first time those boys had seen

nature in the flesh. There they had witnessed the limestone scars.

It is still not clear why that particular horse.

It is still not clear why this particular survival.

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POSTREALISM II

Speaking frankly, I say again there is no realism

or else we would not hound the pastureland

for God with the scythed voices of water and

the subject too would not swallow its narrator the shoal

of omniscience bony between teeth / You thought you held

the charges of the day the tactile boundaries

of white white skies the alphabet bone house dictionary

and its apertures / Today I house you

in my memory work, where there is no incursion

no day definition no high night no no there –

If I had the antennae of realism I would

seek justification – invent some defense

for why you are dead, and can never be

but the dead whose head

was more red fog than head

whose red was long beaked

and hot who said

attest attest

what red is done this wrong head

whose killer was a song of red.

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