Freely offering the audience manual sexual gratification Cathy Petch hosted another wild night at Plasticine Poetry. After a rapid-fire onslaught of open stagers (I got into that initial rush with my shark week piece) we were ready for the first feature.

John Oughton (who recently took a picture of me undressing at Lizzie’s birthday) is a poet I’ve never heard before. He read some great short fiction from his recent chap book. One story was of an artist’s dream in which  ‘lonely she sketches a dog’ which comes to life – she wakes to find a broken pencil on the pillow beside her. His fluid writing takes simple, direct images and skews them ever so slightly: ‘she wanted him, but didn’t want to talk to him’ ‘a friend becomes a lover but not yours.’

He was followed by Lizzie Violet, a poet I have heard many times and…