Rue Collinge’s pamphlet ‘HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON’ came first in the Best Unpublished Pamphlet category of the 2025 Disabled Poets Prize.

SHE SAW NICK DRAKE IN THE MIRROR TODAY 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.

SHE SAW NICK DRAKE IN THE MIRROR TODAY

Is it something about her chin? Not the little hairs that keep sprouting there, not an eight o’clock shadow of hair — no, it’s the yawn in the eyes staring back at her. She is no stranger to the black-eyed dog. He lounges in her living room, shadows her to the bedroom, mouths on her ankles whilst she boots up the laptop for work. His breath huffs hot on her feet. She pushes him away. He’s a heavy boy. On days where he is stuck to her like velcro she cracks open her brain and prods the yolk, wondering.

Other people, she is certain, have black-eyed cats, which come and go as they please, ease their way onto your lap when they’re ready for a stroke – hers squeezes into the stupid spaces, the ones too narrow for even a head, lays that lead-like lug of his in the crease of her neck, wants to be a part of everything until she’s not a part of anything. And he speaks for her. Sometimes it is his howl and not her voice that shrills an answer. He has her panting for breath, makes it hard to heft herself to the end of that day’s race, let alone run.

Thank God for her Saturday suns. The ones who sit on the sofa and boot the black-eyed dog to the floor when he’s using her as a lap, when his long bones make it di”cult to breathe, that day. When the dragon’s wings beat a hurricane. They don’t say anything. They lie, sunny side up. They breathe on her, in her, with her. They trace around the sun-bleached spots on the carpet. They rekindle the glow of the thousand moments her black-eyed dog only watched. They remind her that she is not just a dog owner.

About Rue Collinge

Rue Collinge is a slam-winning poet and community artist in North-East England. Raw and lyrical, she has performed across the UK and on the radio. She is a Pushcart and Forward Prize nominee, won the Philip Larkin Prize in 2020, and was a semi-finalist for BBC Words First. She is a disability advocate and creative facilitator, helping people to unlock their own stories.