Demogorgon by Hannah Linden

A large tree in the middle of green woodland. Large white text reads: Demogorgon. Smaller text reads: Discussing disabled characters in fairy tales and folklore.

‘Downe in the bottome of the deepe Abysse/ Where Demogorgon in dull darknesse pent,/ Farre from the view of Gods and heauens blis,/ The hideous Chaos keepes, their dreadfull dwelling is’ from The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser.

She’s finding the pattern in empty packets of crisps                                                                   
across the living room floor. There’s a river running
through a valley between mountains of pizza boxes,
a waterfall over rocks of scattered shoes. She’s
not going anywhere but here is the world in miniature.
One day (soon) she’ll gather it all up, put it on a boat
and sail this Italy and the Alps all the way to the tip. Then
the room will be the Gobi desert, lizards hiding away
during the day but chasing spiders and scorpions
 throughout the night. She doesn’t feel ready
for that yet, adds an empty sweet wrapper. She knows
you can’t step in the same river twice, and as soon
as the river meets the sea, there’s a reckoning. First
she’ll watch how silver foil glints in the midday sun.

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About the author:
Hannah Linden has struggled with depression and anxiety most of her life. She’s a survivor of multiple traumas, including the suicide of her father when she was a child. Her poetry explores many kinds of impact from mental health challenges and she is particularly interested in the way trauma, and the experience of marginalisation, is explored in folklore and fairy tale, in both negative and positive ways. She has a Northern working-class background but, for many years, has lived in ramshackle social housing in Devon. She is widely published and, most recently, won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition 2021, and was Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky, (V. Press) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023. X: @hannahl1n