Hour of Writes is a weekly, peer-reviewed writing competition. Enter now for a chance to win, and to receive personal feedback on your entry.

Editorial

18th September 2018

Deciding on a theme for Hour of Writes is a tricky business. It must be precise enough to inspire writers to create pieces with clear connections to the theme, but broad enough that each entry will be unique. Of all things Attack And Receive could have been inspired by, it came from a playing card in the franchise that dominated my childhood: Yu-Gi-Oh. With such an aggressive phrase, I was hoping for war, embittered couples, and intrigue. I was delighted to find all this, alongside some whimsy.

I was immediately drawn to Entry 3155, which explores a situation too many of us will be familiar with. It reminds us that those who suffer from violence often turn to violence, that this cycle is not easily broken. Entry 3155 also shows that there can be a lot of power in simple language.

Entry 3160, Red Poppy Boy (gets what’s coming to him), has a lovely rhythm that drives the reader through a story of addiction and consequence. This can be seen especially in the second stanza, with: ‘an A1 stealer / all state receiver / a total syringe believer’. Successfully employing rhythm always makes a poem more compelling.

With Entry 3163, we see a regular structure and rhythm used to great effect. The images were very vivid, essential for communicating a story with such a degree of movement and as many changes in scene. I particularly enjoyed the shift in scale in:

‘Zipping through the midges and the dragonflies / We crest the spikes and fall into a murderous scrum’,

making the poem more dynamic and cinematic.

For me, Entry 3159 was the obvious winner. Gentle and concise, the piece takes us ‘inch by inch’ through a race. The poem is dense with imagery, and it is a credit to the author that they evoked such a strength of feeling in me with so few lines. I keep returning to:

‘The last water gone / Like legs / with nothing left / except blisters, cramp, / tiredness beyond enduring’,

drawn by its subtlety of rhythm and simplicity of language.

Thank you to everyone who entered. Judging this competition was a wonderful excuse to sit down, have a cup of tea, and immerse myself in varied poetry and prose. You each responded to the prompt differently, making this process an absolute pleasure. I hope you all continue to write great work for Hour of Writes, and for yourselves.

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About The Judge

Jack Cooper works at the University of Oxford, in a laboratory that uses the sexual courtship of fruitflies as a model to understand core features of development and behaviour. His poetry has been longlisted for the National Poetry Competition, and shortlisted for The New Poets Prize and Segora Poetry Competition amongst others. Stephen King, Final Fantasy, and K-Pop are the great loves of his life.

You can find him on Twitter at @JackCooper666, and on Instagram at @JackCooper0696

Ephemera

If we consider the body crudely as composed of liquid, solid and gas, then, my apple, my lamb, it is this that I love: your viscosity, every drop of you. For surely, of these three states of matter, it is liquid, the essential; the fat tears that spring from you are a marvel.
Your face, aged almost two, is plump and dewy, water-rich; an ad for moisturiser - all chubby babies are; deep crinkles in your wrists like joined sausages. Compared of course to old age, the great withering, skin turning to paper, muscle to powder... our waters drying up to leave us open-mouthed, parched parchment, our histories written on our perished scrolls of flesh. Although indeed you can die of wet rot as much as dry rot - my grandmother, fatally, had water on the lung; she drowned from the inside.
You're sick, sweetheart, a passing thing; and when you hugged me earlier I smelled the faint, day-old tang of vomit on your neck. And then you fell asleep, and I lay an inch away and smelled the thick fug of mucus, your breathing labouring wetly under a heavy tide.
It is this that I love, your essence, your humours, sweet or foul; and this I cannot hold, for as water runs through fingers we we cannot ever really hold another. We are two streams running together for a while before the flood rushes us on. What can we do but savour, savour, even as we turn to vapour, what can we do but love...every...drop; and every drop of you, I love.