Benjamin Larner’s pamphlet ‘Freakshow’ came second in the Best Unpublished Pamphlet category of the 2025 Disabled Poets Prize.
hineni [ יננה ] is one of the pieces that features in the pamphlet.
The Disabled Poets Prize looks to find the best work created by UK-based deaf and disabled poets.
hineni [ יננה ]
i want to be
kind. to know, over
the crippled throw of a
pub bench, you’re ok. that
nothing, beery
by the glassful, means
nothing, as you dif-
fuse, in your own
vapid way, the seam of
my chest un-
picked to a frilly,
candyfloss mess.
keep me
safe. know you are
blessed. that there’s no
healing, only
anaplerosis: the
filling of an absence or
void, the supplementation of a
26
lack. that, unsurprisingly,
life’s green
rape suffocates. and
there is so much i would like to
forget. hospital beds. my nephew’s
death. faith-
lessness. so much
humiliation. but the most
putrid stuff is
holy. after all,
shame is
ultra-processed: looks
edible, digestible, delicious,
but isn’t. so spit
me out like
bubble-gum. in the plague-pit of a
kiss, i know myself:
a stoma, my openness is art-
ifice. the same fish-
out-of-water breathless-
27
ness gulls
pick at on ridley road.
yes, it’s hard
to be kind. but i am
happy to do my part.
what’s to forgive,
really? family is
cancer. love-rat nibbled
marginalia. in-
farct. salmon roe in the
heart. pink, exorbital behest:
the sweetest
sickness i have known.
its cry: hineni! hineni!
like the man who
died outside my window,
ignored, i’ll pass this
dead time, then be
swept away,
pebbles chipped from
28
irani bread. i mean,
what’s to be done? it’s so
normal. happens
every day. don’t look,
or do. either way: here i am.
About Benjamin Larner
Benjamin J Larner (b.1990) is a disabled poet of Iraqi/Irish/Ashkenazi heritage. He won second place in the 2024 Ivan Juritz Prize, and has been longlisted for the 2025 United Agents/Goldsmiths Pat Kavanagh Prize, the 2024 London Magazine Poetry Prize, the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize, and the 2023 Dreich Classics Chapbook Prize. Awarded a scholarship to study BMus Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, he received the Academy’s Arthur Hervey Scholarship Prize upon graduation. In 2023 he commenced Goldsmiths’ Creative and Life Writing MA, for which he was also awarded an academic scholarship, graduating with a distinction in 2024. Recent/upcoming publications include Agenda, Goldfish, Tears in the Fence, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and Dreich. He currently assists Poetry London.