ANNA BEECHER
Anna Beecher works with words, performance and people. An award winning poet (Buzzwords, Royal Berkshire Poetry Competition) and playwright, Anna recently wrote The Surplus, a new play full of poems commissioned by the Young Vic and performed by a cast of 62 teenagers at the Young Vic in March. Last year Anna created and performed Living Things at Battersea Arts Centre, a collection of stories, poems and songs about death and she’s currently working on her 4th solo spoken word show; Iron Jon, a lyrical, irreverent take on the tale by the Brothers Grimm which will be performed at Art in Action Festival this July.
Stroke City
For a bit you slipped into the single syllable explosion of calling him Dad.
It thumped into conversations-We should go and see my Dad
The airbag of the ‘a’ inflating -between tooth baring plosives.
We had just met when he hurtled back into your orbit
And you spent a season sampling new intimacies, feeling for a fit
With both of us.
You began to hold my hand and maybe it wasn’t fate
that had made you a man who loved his father’s favourite bands
but it was a magic trick to unpick the past with.
For a dry run at rekindling he took you skiing
And then we both went over to see him in a place he called Stroke City
You taking the wheel of his taxi so he could roll cigarettes,
Tobacco clinging to his thin legs and radio singing.
Battles that had barely died down had left the town illustrated
and suspended between names he explained,
your accent London to his Derry when it briefly punctuated his hurry
To fill the space left vacant by years of missing conversations.
And as David Hay beat The Beast From The East you were introduced
My son, a phrase as new as if you were new born.
Tugging off your well-worn name he slid you
into the similar syllables of the one you once went by
Which you shrugged from your shoulders and said didn’t feel right.
And at some point that night he began to regain
The distancing hiss of his first name
The fricative forced through closed lips.
Glasses piling up around you like yesterdays, the two of you drank like there was no tomorrow.
