Something a little different for you this week! It’s a poem, but it’s specifically within the fantasy genre and is part of a little casual collection I’ve been building up to populate the worldbuilding of a project I’ve been working on. I thought it would be fun to include here on the blog, and I might post a few more in the coming weeks, so here’s the first one!
Author Archives: Oskar Leonard
Oskar Leonard is a trans author, poet and illustrator from the UK, as well as a beta-reader and proofreader through Fiverr. He has written fifteen books: six novels, five poetry collections, three novellas and a short story collection.
His short works have been featured in publications such as The Meadowlark Review, Pen & Quill and Juven. He has achieved a First Class Honours BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from Edge Hill University.
The Matter of The Chest
This week, I’ve got a poem for you and an exciting announcement – this poem was published in Issue I of These Writers’ Voices, ‘The Silence’, yesterday, which you can check out for free right here! If you’d like to just read this poem, I’ve included it below for you. This is a pretty personal one that covers three different stages in my journey of having top surgery, so I really hope you enjoy it!
Inexplicable
Back to the poetry this week! This one is just a little light-hearted take on the random appearance of spiders in places that really don’t seem beneficial for them, considering their fly-based diet. It’s just a fun poem, so I hope you enjoy it!
Duke’s Descent
I know that we’ve been on a roll with the poetry posts over the last few weeks, but I’ve decided to give you something a bit different today – a short story! This one has an interesting background too, as it was actually the first time I tried out writing the character of Duke, who is the main character in The Horse Who Fell in Scorland. He’s in a similar setting but a pretty different situation in this short story, and I think it’s quite interesting to see how far the idea developed between this short story and the novella. So, I hope you enjoy Duke’s Descent!
Rip Out The Pages, Burn The Textbook
Another poem this week, and it’s another one that I wrote for uni as well! This one is a sort of melding of the idea of personal history and history as a subject (i.e. being taught in school), with a ton of different images rolled up into one poem just for you. I hope you enjoy it!
Worship
I’ve got another poem for you this week! We’re creeping slowly closer to Halloween (even though it’s still a bit away) so I thought a horror-themed poem might be a good idea! Worship is another one that I wrote for university, and I hope that you enjoy reading it!
Numbers, Numbers, Numbers…
I’ve got another poem for you this week! Keeping with the theme of the past few weeks, this is another one that I wrote for uni, and I hope that it will be particularly poignant to anyone who’s ever been stuck on hold on the phone – which is, in all likelihood, most people. Anyway, here’s the poem!
A Raging Blood-Blush
This is another poem that I wrote for uni, but just a short one this week – with some attention paid to alliteration, which you’ll see in just a moment! I feel like this one has the same sort of vibes as the poems in Aleatory Poetry and perhaps Commute to an extent, so if you enjoy this one then feel free to give those a look-over too.
There Are No Bears In Ormskirk
This week’s poem is a light-hearted one that I am delighted to say was published in Active Muse’s Varsha 2024 Poetry Collection, and which I also had the opportunity to read out at Wigan Pride this past Saturday. I did want to upload the recording of that here, but it turns out I can’t add videos to these posts directly, so I’ll likely be uploading it to my X/Twitter account and then linking that to the Press page like I did for my 2022 performance.
The Feeding of Memories
Continuing the theme from the past few weeks, I’ve got another poem for you today! There’s a bit of a clear pattern with this one, which I tried to have some fun with, although ‘fun’ doesn’t feel quite right to describe a poem with this sort of tone. In any case, I hope you find this one to be an interesting read!
Oskar Leonard 