If you’re going to buy one book this month, you should make it our anthology, Running With the Pack, which is available here. But let’s face it, who’s only buying one book a month? Treat yourself to a whole stack (you absolutely deserve it) - and perhaps one of them could be Rebecca’s pamphlet, Where The Lights Come On, which is also available on our Big Cartel shop.
Thanks for reading Fantastic! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Here’s a taster of the kind of thing you can find in the pamphlet (in fact, it’s the poem that inspired Richard’s gorgeous cover illustration).
By Rebecca Cooney
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
At night she dreamed of flying.
She grew used to loving you from afar,
even as she stood beside you
but the bird in her knew this was no way to live,
no way to love,
so one night you came home
to an apartment full of feathers
and learned you had lost her to the skyline.
I think we should teach girls to run
as soon as they learn to walk.
before we teach them
please and thank you,
before don’t make a scene,
he is only pulling your pigtails (only hurting you)
because he likes you, and liked
is the best thing you can be.
Teach them to run,
so when the time comes to take flight
they will know what a runway is for.
Men who never asked how much they weighed
on the souls of those who loved them
will look up to see a sky full of angels -
not angels,
women,
with wings in place of the arms they will no longer use
for holding up anyone but themselves.
They are women,
flesh and blood, needs and faults
and hearts still aching for what they fledgling fled
singing grief and hope as two sides of the same moon.
At night she dreams of you and her feathers twitch.
She learned to care for you from afar
and it is a difficult habit to break
but at this altitude she has perspective,
can see the paths you would have trodden together
and how heavily she would have been bound to them.
Growing wings is wrenching, bloody.
she will not give them up now.
She will fly as far as she needs to be free.
At night I dream of you and my shoulder blades itch.
There was a feather on my pillow this morning.
I think it is time
to run. Rebecca K Cooney is a journalist and performance poet who is attempting to be a novelist as well.
Her debut pamphlet, Where The Lights Come On, was published in July 2023 by Allographic.
She was a Hammer & Tongue National Slam 2018 finalist and is a multiple-time winner of the Hammer & Tongue Cambridge Poetry Slam, Farrago Slam, Genesis Slam and Poetry At Your Place Slam. She has featured at poetry nights across London and the South East. She also performed on the Poetry&Words Stage at Glastonbury in 2023.
Rebecca’s poems have been published in the Spoken Word London Anti-Hate Anthology, The Dear Damsels Annual 2018 and the anthology Let Me Know When You’re Home. Her poem ‘This Is How to Forget Your History’ was longlisted for the 2020 Outspoken Poetry Prize.
The Fantastic Writers Collective is a group of UK-based writers who enjoy telling stories about the weird and the wonderful.
Our debut anthology is available here.
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