Nina Boyd

Biography

Nina was the overall winner in the 2009 Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition. Her first collection will be published in Autumn 2010. She is a student on the MA Poetry course at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has had poems published in many magazines, including The North, The Rialto, iota and The Interpreter's House. She is always happy to give readings, and has read at The Albert in Huddersfield, The New Beehive in Bradford, Manchester Central Library, and the Huddersfield Literature Festival. She helps to organize the Albert Poets readings on the second Thursday of each month in Huddersfield.

Samples

Penguins in Toowoomba We made a dusty three-hour trip, changed drivers by some emus caged in a wire enclosure, peered into prehistoric eyes. There was nothing else alive until we reached the emerald edge of a town like any other, except that it lay in a moonscape. The shop sold knitting wool, flip flops, purple bananas from the north. I bought a notebook, too perfect to write in, rows of penguins on the cover. Fading birds and snow-white pages remind me of the corrugated heat of flower-bright streets, where it seemed certain that nothing bad would ever happen. Gallop Papa has a mind to marry me off to the major, home from Bengal to find, woo and wed a passable bride, and carry her off on a P&O liner to idle in sunshine where servants are naked and brown. This suitor has no more appeal than the banker, or the doctor who lisped, or the lizard-eyed priest, who left me unbought by their wealth. He tugs at his earlobe and coughs: mute and pink as a pig with no brain. If I wanted to marry, it wouldn’t be him with his whiskery wisps and dissolute breath; but his medals are splendid, pinned to the breast of a tight-fitting jacket, exactly my size. I long for the freedom of trousers, the stubble of serge, cuffs chafing my wrist as I canter the Indian plains to rescue a curly-haired girl, and press her against my rough chest, safe from a coarse soldier-boy. Jam Someone has left a half-eaten doughnut on his desk. Jam oozes on to a freshly-printed holiday rota and awards Julie (red) an undeserved extra week. She sashays in, lips sparkly with sugar. He hates her: the way she plays with him, flaunts her curves, fills his room with her cat-scent, dares him. Not mine, she says; I have to watch my hips. He watches them with her. On his way home he calls in at Curl up’n Dye. Shirley is shutting up early for lack of trade. They go for a drink in The Sailor instead. He’s known her from school, so it isn’t a date. He drinks innocent vodka, pulls twenty-pound notes from a fat wallet, watches the faces light up. They are cheaper even than Julie, and none of them tease. It’s so easy, once you know how. That night, he loses his head and his wallet, and regrets neither. He cherishes the next day’s pain. When Julie and her breasts put a cup of coffee on his desk he swivels away. I’d like you to dress decently from now on, he says to a view of containers: Hapag Lloyd, China Packing. From now on? She smooths down her skirt as if nothing has changed; but she knows it has.

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