Editorial Note by Max Wallis
“Polly Atkin’s Pain Parade takes what most of us try to hide or name in whispers and lets it arrive at full volume, in costume. Pain becomes pageant, procession, myth. A bruise turns into a banner. A body’s flare transforms into dragon, unicorn, moth, owl.
Chronic pain is not an event; it’s a life. It doesn’t visit for a night and leave quietly, but rather marches in, day after day, reshaping everything. Polly Atkin’s Pain Parade understands this. It refuses the lie of a single image, a single neat metaphor. Instead pain keeps changing costume because that’s what chronic pain does. It mutates, confuses, dazzles, and exhausts.
What I find so exact here is the parade itself: pain arriving in procession, demanding attention, bending the world into its shapes. Intimate and spectacular. It both tethers but also unfurls as banner. It fragments time, splits the self, and makes the body - of all things - uncanny.
I don’t have chronic pain myself, but complex-PTSD can function similarly; the body exacts a toll from the physicality of the condition: fatigue, ache, pain, from tension held for far too long.
Pain Parade doesn’t console in its aftermath. What it does is recognise the endless theatre of living with pain, and in that recognition, there is something like solidarity. It is a hand-mirror held up to the aftershock, still rippling.”
Pain Parade
by Polly Atkin
Sometimes pain comes in in a parade, waving banners,
a hand held out before it as if to halt all traffic, as if
to say STOP little pigeon, I will take it from here, I am pain!
Pain wears a head like a moth and the body of an owl.
Pain’s feet bend the wrong way. Pain
appears to be looking ahead but that’s gaze
misdirection, to confuse pain’s predators. Pain
has a mouth like a star, a head split in two.
Is purple and green like a bruise. Pain
carries a pennant as if expecting a tournament.
The flag, of course, is red, like the sky
is red, a throbbing red, as if
one of its many faces bled out.
Sometimes pain is a bright green dragon
on a ghostly diadem, floating out of itself,
a huge egg concealed in the crawl space which may
or may not belong to the pain. Pain
is a unicorn, or a white charger, head
hidden in a canopy of spiralling portals.
Pain wears a pink ribbon round its moonlight neck
so you don’t get lost when it carries you away,
though there is nothing solid to tie it to. In the distance,
trees, and the hint of a forest beyond –
and sometimes pain is a spectral labyrinth,
haunting all hours, walls like spokes
of a wheel, separating the woman, the child,
the horse, the bull, the pageant.
Buy Some of Us Fall here and The Company of Owls here.
POLLY ATKIN (FRSL) is a poet and nonfiction writer. She has published three poetry pamphlets and two collections – Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) and Much With Body (Seren: 2021), a PBS Winter 2021 recommendation and Laurel Prize 2022 longlistee. Her nonfiction includes Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband: 2021), a Barbellion-longlisted biography of Dorothy’s later life and illness, and a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability, Some Of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre: 2023), a longlistee of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2024, and Hunter Davies Lakeland Book of the Year 2024. Her third nonfiction book is a love song to the owls of Lakeland, The Company of Owls (Elliott and Thompson: 2024). She works as a freelancer from her home in the English Lake District. In 2023 she and her partner took ownership of historic Grasmere bookshop Sam Read Bookseller.
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