Katy Evans-Bush’s new chapbook, Oscar & Henry, is available from Rack Press, limited to 150 copies, the first fifty numbered and signed by the author. Oscar is the inimitable Oscar Wilde, and Henry is, of course, Mr. James. Below is “Speculation and Conjecture”, the first poem from this splendid little book, which you may purchase from Amazon UK by clicking on its title above.

The Master: did he, or didn’t he?
Perhaps he simply didn’t document
his nights of surreptitious devilment;
even now the biographers disagree.

Possibly he walked, buttoned up and sad,
in circular, self-defeating perambulations
amid the insistent, whispered speculation
of many a prudish dame or sneering lad.

He buttoned up his meticulous overcoat
and stared over the railings of the promenade,
his eyebrows lowering with visions vaguely malade,
his respectability beyond a shadow of a doubt.

***

Or did Henry carouse with boys;
kiss sailors in the dark, then go;
with opera-glass in hand, sweep low
to, once he was assured, arise
with opera candles in his eyes.