Month: September 2025

Satellite of Love Community Poem

July 2025

Hehe Haha! I know nothing about poetry.
I came with no expectations, an open heart and an open mind. 2 drinks, amazing conversations, I’m glad of what I could find. – An occult sacrifice of 3 dead rats, floating in a food waste bin.

Live. Laugh. Die young.
But you know what they say, it’s better to be pissed off, than pissed on.
Oh! We’re out of loo roll, I guess it’s the bucket again…

Never ask a penguin the time, they lie.
The professional bios were stolen by a pigeon outside?
The owl and the pussycat want for a pea.

She said – for the hundredth time- Time is elastic, but nobody listened.
She said she’s like a potato, best when baked and smashed.
This above all to thine own self be true.

I wore booty shorts, and now my arse is sticking to the seats.
And in this room, my fire caught heart…
I can’t remember life before the turd that wouldn’t flush.

Sometimes somethings are wonderful.
Today I saw a dog, running down the road, pulling the cafe chair its lead had been tied to. The wings of a shot arrow will not always reach the bird that has already discovered flight.

I’m a cosmic little brat
I wish people would give me free drugs.
Mercury is in Lucozade.

Ozzy, Ozzy, you made us all laugh when you wore your wife’s cozzy, because she’d hidden yours. The world is in ruins and it’s all my fault. My head is my only house unless it rains.

I spoke the truth, but ai forgot to say it quietly. My notes app could be used against me in a murder case:
Smothering a ladybug to death with your tits is arguably something you never fully recover from.

Anyone seen Alan?
You are the right side of annoying.
Alone in a room with a half used role of cellotape hanging in mid air.

Be gay, do crime, get drunk.
Look at this cunty lemon drizzle.
Not even the rain, has such small hands.

Use the shoe rack, don’t use the shoe rack. Make your mark life after dark
Spotlight on the small shards of bone making my skillfully sewn costume unbearable.

I haven’t submitted verse, because I spent all my time drawing. Go to Manchester for one night, then go to Belgium for 3-4 nights. My pussy stinks like cat food, but it’s nothing compared to my attitude.

Father dusk eat the mango.
I will not die your daughter.
At the end of it all, passion young fever.

EVER TRIED? EVER FAILED? NO MATTER. TRY AGAIN. FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER.
I fear this may be the end of this cold charade, for I cannot stand another night.
Fall into the earth, meet a merry possum.

Home » Archives for September 2025

Satellite of Love: Burning Eye Takeover – Caitlin O’Ryan & Georgie Jones

At the Loco Klub 26th November
Doors at 7pm Event starts 7.30pm
Event finishes at 10.30

Book tickets

Georgie Jones is a poet and performer known for her humour and heart. Praised for her ‘formidable stage presence and compelling way with words’ (reviewshub) Georgie’s poetry feels like a really good chat with a really old friend (lifelong as opposed to ancient).

She explores the exquisite messiness of modern existence through poetry, stories and just a smidge of oversharing, with abundant wit and warmth in tow. Georgie can’t promise any answers, but she’ll do her best to make you feel better about not having them.

Caitlin O’Ryan’s debut collection is a journey of mirror smashing and everything we have come to accept being called into question. With deep vulnerability and wit, she invites us to look inside of ourselves and to interrogate what we find there. Fuelled by the times that we are living in, her poems vibrate through the pages, grabbing you with a sense of urgency that says “you are not alone, I also feel this”.

Taken from her live performances and featuring her viral poem ‘AT WHAT POINT’ which has amassed millions of views online and culminated in her being invited onto BBC Woman’s Hour, this book will light a fire in you that will continue to burn long after you have put it down. Caitlin is also known for her recurring role in the hit TV series Outlander.

‘Caitlin’s words are as powerful on the page as they are on the stage.‘ Harry Baker

‘A devastatingly heartfelt, intelligent, witty and turbulent ode to female friendship, fears, hopes and dreams … the book I wish I’d had in my twenties but so glad to have now in my forties, where I still swim in the uncertainties of this beautiful and confounding life.‘ Catriona Balfe

Book tickets

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio)

Home » Archives for September 2025

Satellite of Love Presents: Holly Moberley’s ‘Kinder Parasites’ Book Launch

On board the John Sebastian Lightship 4th November
Doors 7pm event starts 7.30pm
Finishes 10pm

Book tickets


Join Holly Moberley and friends in the launch of her debut pamphlet ‘Kinder Parasites’ with stripped back support sets from local musician JuJu and poet Raina Greifer at the Lightship.

Holly Moberley (she/they) is a queer poet and poison berry from the South East. She is a Poetry Society Young Critic and has been published in fourteen poems, Bi+Lines, Butcher’s Dog & The North. She is Bristol’s 2021 LYRA Slam Champion and identifies her work as feminist diary entries from your weird cousin. Avoidantly confronting, delightfully despicable, Holly’s poetry welcomes readers into the dark dark forest of tumblr pages for hands and lesbians in the US cabinet. ‘Kinder Parasites’, published by Broken Sleep Books, is her debut pamphlet.

‘Kinder Parasites’ Summary:

‘Kinder Parasites’ is a feminist séance with pop-culture’s most infamous. Influenced by queer theatrics and by personified feather boa — Hera Lindsay Bird, this pamphlet aims to strike a match and wake the dead; exploring the mariana trench of lesbian love and loneliness. In ‘Kinder Parasites’, Megan Fox has a heartbeat Shostakovich can’t bear and the gravedigger digs a hole during the speed dating event. What begins as a fun exploration of blood suckers, the natural world and pop-culture descends into a clamber through human rituals and the complicated queer experience; “meow this cosmic joke!!! this spider’s leg I eventually made crawl!!!”

JuJu
Hailing from Bristol & London, JuJu (she/her) draws influence from the likes of PJ Harvey, Florence Welch and Kate Bush. Juju is a gothic force who merges heavy synths and thunderous guitars. Conjuring up moody and queer alt pop-rock anthems, JuJu’s dark lyricism and powerful stage presence both charms and mystifies. She will be bewitching listeners with an acoustic set on launch night.

Raina Greifer (she/they) is a performance maker, producer, and frequent party planner. They were shortlisted for the SH24: Sexual Health Awards 2022 as Young Person of the Year and were a BBC Words First Finalist in 2021. Her solo show MANIC won Best Solo Show at Fuse International in 2022 and was shortlisted for the 2023 Saboteur Awards. Often found reading erotica or putting on cabarets, Raina’s work is some of the boldest and sexiest there is.

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio)

Book tickets
Home » Archives for September 2025

Satellite of Love: Sophie Dumont; Meg Avon; Caleb Parkin – Sculling Launch & open mic.

At the Loco Klub 22nd of October
Doors at 19:00 event starts at 19:30
Finishes at 22:30

Book tickets

Join us for an evening of words, water, and wonder as we launch Sophie Dumont’s debut poetry collection Sculling. This is not just a book launch – it’s a celebration of the Bristol’s River Avon.
Lyrical, tender and fierce, Sculling traces grief, desire, and transformation through the movement of rivers, asking how we live, love, and let go.
Sophie will be supported by poetry from Bristol’s Caleb Parkin and Meg Avon.
Let’s create an Avon-loving evening rippling with community, mourning and merrymaking!


Dress code: Your rivery finest. Think river silks, moonlight sequins, driftwood crowns – anything that makes you feel like part of the tide.

About Sculling:

In her unflinching and tenderly obsessive collection, Sculling, poet Sophie Dumont explores a deeply personal relationship to the River Avon, as she circles the curses that unravel from a canoe club.

At the age of sixteen, Sophie Dumont trained to be a canoe coach before her own coach and partner of three years died suddenly in an aquaplaning road accident, which led to five of his organs continuing at least seven people’s lives. His heart was donated to a young man studying in the same city as he did.

Using the kayak as a vessel to traverse life’s accumulation of losses, Sculling speaks of how this bereavement caused Dumont to reflect on her relationship to bodies of water, from her own body to the state of pollution in UK rivers. Here, she explores the campaign for rivers to be given personhood status for rights to protection and inspects the symbiosis of her body and the river’s.


Sculling is a powerful investigation into categories of haunting, from a body living on through donated organs, through dementia’s slow erasure, and through witnessing her niece learn object permanence – that things continue to exist when they are not visible.

In her fiercely vulnerable and meticulous debut, Dumont probes the urge to call out when under a bridge, to hear oneself ricocheted back, changed:

‘. . . a boy in a red cap opens his throat, throws sound
into shadows, as we’ve all done,
in the reckless hope of its return.’

Image credit: Jae Frederick

About Sophie:

Sophie Dumont is a poet and copywriter based in Bristol and Bath. Her poetry won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize and has appeared in The Rialto, Magma, The Moth, Ink Sweat and Tears and Mslexia among others. Dumont has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has held writing residencies along Bristol Harbourside with Boat Poets and Exeter Quay through Literature Works.

About Meg:

Meg Avon of The River Bride is a Bristol-based celebrant, poet, activist, performance artist and environmental romantic. From Meg: “In June 2023, I married my local river the Bristol Urban Avon. I married them not just because I love the river deeply, but because I wanted to raise awareness about river pollution with a story that is engaging. Two years on and the relationship is still going strong. I have left my job as a community worker to pursue a career as a writer and campaigner, touring my first collection of poetry My Avon earlier this year.”

About Caleb:

Caleb Parkin was Bristol City Poet 2020 – 22. He’s published three pamphlets and his debut collection, This Fruiting Body was longlisted for the Laurel Prize; his second, Mingle, was published Oct 2024. He’s a PhD researcher with RENEW Biodiversity at the University of Exeter, and an experienced tutor and workshop leader.

Image credit: Vonalina Cake

Book tickets

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio)

Home » Archives for September 2025

Satellite of Love presents: Jo Eades ‘Flanked’ Book Launch

John Sebastian Lightship 8th October 2025
Doors open 7.00pm event starts 7.30pm
Ends 10pm

Book tickets

Jo Eades performs regularly on the Bristol spoken word scene. In 2023, she performed on the Milk Poetry stage at Valleyfest and was selected as one of eight emerging poets from the South West to be part of Apple and Snakes’ Future Voices project. In 2024 she was the Lyra Bristol Poetry Slam Champion and won the Hip Yak Poetry Shack Slam at WOMAD Festival. In 2025 she featured at Keynsham Music Festival, won the Ledbury Poetry Festival Slam and came fourth in the England SLAM! Championships.

Flanked:
From the horrors of toddler classes to the complexities of grief, Flanked is a smorgasbord of maternal experience and emotion. A scrutiny of motherhood across generations and an exploration of loss as both heart-wrenching and liberating.

Tinged with doubt, regret, guilt, acceptance, joy and love, Flanked captures the intricate dynamics of mother / daughter relationships — where roles morph and history repeats.
A reflection on letting go and looking forward.

Flanked will be published by Burning Eye Books in October 2025

JEMMA HATHAWAY
Jemma Hathaway likes to put words next to one another and see if they hit it off. She writes about big four-letter things: time, hope, love, loss – and the innumerable ways they touch our lives. She hopes to reach yours today.

ADAM ELMS
Adam Elms is a visually impaired creative whose work has been published in over twenty books, journals, and magazines. Adam won the Waltham Forest Poetry Award in 2023 with his poem, ‘The Last VHS Player in England’, and has been nominated for the 2025 Forward Prize.

ERYN MCDONALD
Eryn is an interdisciplinary artist working across poetry, dance, theatre and film. They were part of the 2024 Apples & Snakes South West Cohort along with Jo, during which they created a poetry film about queerness and leaving home in search of community.

BEN VINCE
Ben Vince is a Bristol based poet and performer, the winner of the 2025 Lyra Festival Slam, and a finalist for the Mind Over Matter national slam. He has been published in Horizon, The Mays and Dawntreader (forthcoming) and is currently completing a PhD in queer ecological literature at the University of Bristol.

ALEXIS BROOKS
Her poetic narratives explore the crevices and characters that we often bypass, shun or cross the road to avoid. Alexis peels back their layers until all that is left are the glimpses and reflections of ourselves. Alexis is a SLAM-winning poet who has been described as “one of the most exciting fresh forces in poetry in the South West.

Book tickets

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio)

Home » Archives for September 2025

Satellite of Love Community Poem Archive

Community Poem June 2025

Proper Silly Bollocks

My whole existence is flawed
Dreams are shit mate! (whilst squatting)
Memory remembers to forget what it knew
I’ve been learning to swim on Duolingo
I like a man with appropriate legs
I watched a woman on the bus finish reading, then fold up her book in bubblewrap
I keep manifesting my cat can talk
I’m late diagnose awesome (spin around)
But first, I need a wee
It wasn’t clear if I followed through
luckily, we don’t have a blame culture

They scraped me off the pavement and put the finest dancing shoes on me
Hey now, you’re an all star, get your game on, go play
Ra ra ah-ah-ah, ram-ah, ra-ah-ah, gaga oo-la-la, want your bad romance

I’m chopping carrots in the kitchen
Thinking about the small tragedy of the wrong-flavoured icecream
Imagining playing cluedo, but all the murder weapons are seashells
What would nanny plum do?
Don’t compromise when you can be comfortable, she’d say
the black mould on your rented bedroom wall whispers and sings you lullabies of decay

Oh, to be a dog with it’s head out the car window
Oh, how much of something do you read before it becomes a collection?
Oh,  I birthed my orange cat
Oh, how I love my cat lalalalala ok ok ok ok ok
Oh, if you pass me the crisps, you won’t get a kiss
Oh, this is proper silly bollocks.

Home » Archives for September 2025