Hera Lindsay Bird
* * *
HERA LINDSAY BIRD
Contents
WRITE A BOOK
MIRROR TRAPS
MONICA
WAYS OF MAKING LOVE
HAVING SEX IN A FIELD IN 2013
IF YOU ARE AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PHARAOH
HATE
CHILDREN ARE THE ORGASM OF THE WORLD
WILD GEESE BY MARY OLIVER BY HERA LINDSAY BIRD
BISEXUALITY
THE EX-GIRLFRIENDS ARE BACK FROM THE WILDERNESS
PLANET OF THE APES
LOST SCROLLS
LOVE COMES BACK
THE DAD JOKE IS OVER
EVERYTHING IS WRONG
DAYLIGHT SAVINGS
HAVING ALREADY WALKED OUT ON EVERYONE I EVER SAID I LOVED
KEATS IS DEAD SO FUCK ME FROM BEHIND
NEW THINGS
PAIN IMPERATIVES
FOLLOW PENGUIN
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hera Lindsay Bird has a MA in poetry from Victoria University of Wellington, where she won the 2011 Adam Prize. Her work has been published by The Toast, The Hairpin, Sport, Hue & Cry, The Spinoff, The New Zealand Listener and Best New Zealand Poems. In 2017 she won the Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry and the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize. Hera Lindsay Bird is her first collection; a Laureate’s Choice poetry pamphlet, selected by Carol Ann Duffy and titled Pamper Me to Hell & Back, will be published by smith|doorstop in early 2018. She currently lives in Wellington.
PENGUIN BOOKS
HERA LINDSAY BIRD
‘By turns bleakly hilarious and peppered with pitch-perfect similes … [Hera Lindsay Bird] has made me, like many others, more excited about poetry than I have been in a long time’
Lucy Rhiannon Coslett, Guardian
‘On more than one occasion, while working through a poem, I have found myself asking, “what would Hera Lindsay Bird do?” There should be bumper stickers. Bird’s debut, the self-titled Hera Lindsay Bird is an exhilarating read, but what most enthrall me are her extravagant and cartoonish images … Bird is an enfant terrible’
Lucy Tunstall, Poetry
‘Much has been made of the sexual nature of her writing, but really, Bird’s tendency to feed the reader mildly pornographic images … is the least interesting thing about her. Her sexual references are often sly jokes, the punchlines delivering a sharp jolt that opens you up for lovelier lines that lie scattered all around. It’s a cunning trick, giving the illusion of reckless intimacy, as if the reader’s being dragged into the poet’s very bedroom. But really, Bird is nowhere near the bed. She’s over at her desk, scribbling furiously, thinking hard, quite possibly laughing to herself. Or maybe she’s out in the sitting room, watching sitcom reruns and shouting at her telly … Bird bangs vivid images against one another and jump-cuts from the intensely intimate to the casually conversational … she is perhaps our own fledgling Frank [O’Hara]: loose and sloppy and spirited and sincere, a gifted show-off who’s plugged into the life-giving voltage of pop culture and blessed with a bloody good sense of humour’
Grant Smithies, Sunday Star Times
‘[Bird] shows a rare, self-effacing self-reflexivity in an age of narcissism … this is a poet who is not just using language as a tool, but as an art form … The depths of the emotional space in this work – taken to the realms of the ridiculous – are extraordinary to fathom and relish as a reader’
Kelly Malone, Cordite Poetry Review
‘Even in the most sombre poems, Bird’s language is surprising and delightful … [She] draws revelation from the mundane … there is a satisfying defiance in Hera Lindsay Bird, the poet positioning herself against conservatism and authority … Her work acknowledges that everything is absurd, the system is fucked, but we – indefatigable – will keep making art and we will do it how we want’
Jessica Alice, Kill Your Darlings
‘Garrulous … impressive … Somewhere about halfway during my first reading, I found myself laughing until it hurt’
Airini Beautrais, Listener
for Angelo
WRITE A BOOK
To be fourteen, and wet yourself extravagantly
At a supermarket checkout
As urine cascades down your black lace stocking And onto the linoleum
Is to comprehend what it means to be a poet
To stand in the tepid under-halo
Of your own self-making
And want to die ....
Far away, in a field of wild orchids
Is a backwards sentimentality
Like a Christmas card with the robins scratched out
Well, it was Oscar Wilde who said sentimentality
is ‘the desire to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it’
Like ................. when I masturbate and think of nuns
Yet never go to church at Christmas?
Now I have a Masters degree in poetry and no longer wet myself
But I still have to die in antiquated flowers
Does this make me sentimental?
Well, who’s to judge
You can get away with anything in a poem
As long as you say my tits in it
But it’s a false courage to be so .......... modestly endowed
And have nothing meaningful to say
You might think this book is ironic
But to me, it is deeply sentimental
like ............ if you slit your wrists while winking—does that make it a joke?
To be alive
Is the greatest sentimentality there is
And I live to be sentimental
And I love to be alive
Always weeping at the end of a movie
Over the frosted carriages of yesteryear
I wrote this book, and it is sentimental
Because I don’t have a right-sized reaction to the world
To write a book is not a right-sized reaction
To put all your bad thoughts on paper
And make someone else pay for them
My friend says it’s bad poetry to write a book
And I agree with her
I agree with her ........................................ in principle
But I wrote a book anyway
And I named it after myself
My name is Hera Lindsay Bird
This book is called Hera Lindsay Bird
I wrote it, and I mean at least 75% of it
And if that’s not sentimental
Well ......................................................
One day I’m going to have to pay for it
MIRROR TRAPS
I want to lie naked &
face down
in the beige epicentre
of my despair
/
against the fringed tessellations
of an inner-city graveyard
tombstones wilting in the heat
like black candles
I want to lie alone &
trembling
in my hot neural vacancy
like a jet shadow
across a distant field of corn
emitting
many slow blinks of the heart
& never have a job
I want to lie each night
in the overlapping heat
of your absence
&
shuck my heart
into fresh transparencies
of repentant love
black pheromones pour out of your eyeholes
mirrors curl in the sunlight
you smile at me &
cool beads float through my heart
like the inner pellets
of a frozen baby rattle
&
the overall ache
of never having touched you
wedged
like a double-sided battle-axe
in the cleft of an antique rocking chair
still rocking
with its slow elliptical
murder force
the soft black
drumroll of your gaze
breaks over me
like a molten wave of snow
& my heart
blinks
& flares
like the yellow gills of a taxicab
when you look at me
with your soft austerity
like baby epaulettes
It’s bad poetry to have a body
& want to touch you with it
even worse ........................ to be allowed to
as you stare at me
across the silence
of your rare anti-camouflage
& tell me what it is you have wanted
It’s bad poetry to have a body
and a bad life too
to get everything you wanted
but still walk away
for no other reason
but ........... the unspecified wrongness of your blood
& all you can do
is lie face down on the carpet
it’s love that plummets you
back down the elevator shaft
& it’s love you go missing to
buying candles from an inner-city megastore
there is something wrong with you
there is something wrong with you that is also wrong with me
I want to lie very still
in a discount facial peel
cucumber slices
floating on my eyelids
like a double-salad monocle
I want to stare out the window
in a deep optic hunger
until everything burns
with the mohair of loneliness
& never be touched
I want to lie awake each night
& be struck by
oscillating waves of
regret
the heart like a cold sleigh drawn
again & again
through the dark avenues of spring
always towards your silence
MONICA
Monica
Monica
Monica
Monica
Monica Geller off popular sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S
Is one of the worst characters in the history of television
She makes me want to wash my eyes with hand sanitiser
She makes me want to stand in an abandoned Ukrainian parking lot
And scream her name at a bunch of dead crows
Nobody liked her, except for Chandler
He married her, and that brings me to my second point
What kind of a name for a show was F.R.I.E.N.D.S
When two of them were related
And the rest of them just fucked for ten seasons?
Maybe their fucking was secondary to their friendship
Or they all had enough emotional equilibrium
To be able to maintain a constant state of mutual respect
Despite the fucking
Or conspicuous nonfucking
That was occurring in their lives
But I have to say
It just doesn’t seem emotionally realistic
Especially considering that
They were not the most self-aware of people
And to be able to maintain a friendship
Through the various complications of heterosexual monogamy
Is enormously difficult
Especially when you take into consideration
What cunts they all were
I fell in love with a friend once
And we liked to congratulate each other what good friends we were
And how it was great that we could be such good friends, and still fuck
Until we stopped fucking
And then we weren’t such good friends anymore
I had a dream the other night
About this friend, and how we were walking
Through sunlight, many years ago
Dragged up from the vaults, like
old military propaganda
You know the kind; young women leaving a factory
Arm in arm, while their fiancées
Are being handsomely shot to death in Prague
And even though this friend doesn’t love me anymore
And I don’t love them
At least, not in a romantic sense
The memory of what it had been like not to want
To strap concrete blocks to my head
And drown myself in a public fountain rather than spend another day
With them not talking to me
Came back, and I remembered the world
For a moment, as it had been
When we had just met, and love seemed possible
And neither of us resented the other one
Not just because things ended badly
But more broadly
Because my sadness had less to do with the emotional specifics of that situation
And more to do with the transitory nature of romantic love
Which is becoming relevant to me once again
Because I just met someone new
And this dream reminded me
That, although I believe that there are ways that love can endure
It’s just that statistically, or
Based on personal experience
It’s unlikely that things are going to go well for long
There is such a narrow window
For happiness in this life
And if the past is anything to go by
Everything is about to go slowly but inevitably wrong
In a non-confrontational but ultimately disappointing way
Monica
Monica
Monica
Monica
Monica Geller from popular sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S
Was the favourite character of the Uber driver
Who drove me home the other day
And is the main reason for this poem
Because I remember thinking Monica???
Maybe he doesn’t remember who she is
Because when I asked him specifically
Which character he liked best off F.R.I.E.N.D.S
He said ‘the woman’
And when I listed their names for him
Phoebe, Rachel and Monica
He said Monica
But he said it with a kind of question mark at the end
Like ............... Monica?
Which led me to believe
Either, he was ashamed of liking her
Or he didn’t know who he was talking about
And had got her confused with one of the other
Less objectively terrible characters.
I think the driver meant to say Phoebe
Because Phoebe is everyone’s favourite
She once stabbed a police officer
She once gave birth to her brother’s triplets
She doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks about her
Monica gives a shit what what everyone thinks about her
Monica’s parents didn’t treat her very well
And that’s probably where a lot of her underlying insecurities come from
That have since manifested themselves in controlling
And manipulative behaviour
It’s not that I think Monica is unredeemable
I can recognise that her personality has been shaped
By a desire to succeed
And that even when she did succeed, it was never enough
Particularly for her mother, who made her feel like her dreams were stupid
&n
bsp; And a waste of time
And that kind of constant belittlement can do terrible things to a person
So maybe, getting really upset when people don’t use coasters
Is an understandable, or at least comparatively sane response
To the psychic baggage
Of your parents never having believed in you
Often I look at the world
And I am dumbfounded that anyone can function at all
Given the kinds of violence that
So many people have inherited from the past
But that’s still no excuse to throw
A dinner plate at your friends, during a quiet game of Pictionary
And even if that was an isolated incident
And she was able to move on from it
It still doesn’t make me want to watch her on TV
I am falling in love and I don’t know what to do about it
Throw me in a haunted wheelbarrow and set me on fire
And don’t even get me started on Ross
WAYS OF MAKING LOVE
After Bernadette Mayer
Like a metal detector detecting another metal detector.