Susie Wilson’s pamphlet was shortlisted in the Best Unpublished Pamphlet category for the Disabled Poets Prize 2024.
The winners will be announced on 16 March 2024, during Deptford Literature Festival, in an online event.
Susie Wilson from – Nowhere Near As Safe As a Snake in Bed
© Susie Wilson 2024
Banana Circus
Bananas in spangled coconut bras.
Bananas on horseback on tips of tails,
skins peeled and flipped into striped layer skirts.
Bananas with teaspoons in skinny hands
teeter across a high wire, balancing.
Bananas boom out of a shiny canon.
One banana faking it, with a knife
stuck through the middle of his fleshy parts.
Somehow, all the bananas are grinning.
All this documented in black and white.
You spent childhood time with these bananas.
You didn’t believe then such things could
be possible, reading the big red book
on your grandparents’ attic floor. But now
you want to believe in impossibles.
Slip on a pair of red tails and top hat,
a curly moustache. Be a banana,
if it would help. Become a banana
ringmaster, cracking your whip to dismiss
big cats, anything with an appetite.