The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon…
Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Aliens
Are these alien plants
their blue-green colours
against a permanently pink
Mars-like sky?
No, they are standard pallette
for a contemporary Creatan
landscape gardener
planted against a bold
and untraditional pink
on the gable end of a
lockdown vacant let
between the beach
and the capacious cave where
villagers celebrate fiestas
in normal times.
Evading unlikely police
we are the aliens here…
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
And below is the card that I received from Alison…
The idea of the poems is generally that they should be epistolary, relate to the image on the front of the card, and – if your card has been received already by the sender (not possible with the first few obviously) – then it might relate to your poem too. I am not allowed to show you Alison’s poem but I can say that she probably had received mine and she does reference “a new palette of colours”.