RACHAEL ALLEN
Kingdomland
Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgements
/
Promenade
Kingdomland
Prawns of Joe
Monstrous Horses
Lunatic Urbaine
Volcano
Simple Men
/
Nights of Poor Sleep
/
Many Bird Roast
Sweet’n Low
Beef Cubes
The Indigo Field
Seer
Dad the Pig
Porcine Armour Thyroid
Cravendale
/
The Girls of Situations
Remedies
Tower of Masks
Prairie Burning
The Slim Man
Multiflora
/
Landscape for a Dead Woman
Apostles Burning
Banshee
/
About the Author
Copyright
Acknowledgements
This book is for my family.
‘Landscape for a Dead Woman’ is written in memory. The title is inspired by Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman. The poem opens with a quotation from ‘Later’ by Rae Armantrout.
‘Prawns of Joe’ is written after Selima Hill’s ‘Prawns de Jo’.
A number of these poems are written in response to or in collaboration with visual artworks by Guy Gormley, Marie Jacotey, Vera Iliatova, Anna Mahler and JocJonJosch. I am grateful to these artists for their work.
Thank you to the editors of Ambit, Art Licks, Chicago Review, LEAF!, Magma, Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Rialto, Test Centre, The Verb and The Wolf, where some of these poems first appeared.
Thank you to Guy Robertson and Eva LeWitt at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios, and Cathy Rozel Farnworth at the Roger and Laura Farnworth Poetry and Art Residency in Cornwall.
Thank you to Matthew Hollis and Lavinia Singer for their editorial guidance.
Thank you to Sam Buchan-Watts, Sophie Collins, Lukus Roberts, Andrew Parkes, John Wedgwood Clarke, Harriet Moore, Fiona Benson, Jess Chandler, Hannah Barry, Jack Underwood, Sam Riviere, Nuar Alsadir, Patrick Mackie, Ann Gray and David Woolley for your guidance and help with these poems.
KINGDOMLAND
Watch the forest burn
with granular heat.
A girl, large-eyed
pressure in a ditch
grips to a dank and
disordered root system
no tongue
flavoured camo
bathing in the black
and emergent pool.
See the trees on fire
char simultaneously
as the girl floats up
to the billowing ceiling.
Promenade
Openly wanting something
like the opened-up lungs of a singer.
I walk by the carriage of the sea
and the vinegar wind assaults.
Is this an age of promise? I blush
to want. If I were walking around
with you, arm in arm, along some
iron promenade, you could fill me up
with chocolate, you could push back
my cuticles with want. I’ll just lie down,
my ribs opened up in the old town square
and let the pigs root through my chest.
Kingdomland
The dark village sits on the crooked hill.
There is a plot of impassable paths towards it,
impassable paths overcome with bees,
the stigma that bees bring.
There is a bottle neck at the base of the hive.
There is an impassable knowledge that your eyebrows bring.
Beside the poor library and the wicker-man,
there’s a man who sells peacock feathers on the roundabout,
they scream all night from where they are plucked.
The village is slanted, full of tragedies with slate.
I am walking towards a level crossing,
while someone I love is jogging into the darkness.
Come away from there, I am yelling,
while the black dog rolls in the twilit yard.
Small white socks bob into the dark like teeth in the mouth
of a laughing man, who walks backwards into night,
throwing drinks into the air
like a superstitious wife throws salt.
We all have our share of certainties.
The glass and salt my petulant daughter,
glass and salt my crooked pathway; impassable glass and salt.
Prawns of Joe
When I had a husband I found it hard to breathe.
I was up early, he’d get home late
to rub the baby, we took it in turns.
He left, and if someone knocked for him
now at the door
I would not let him go to them.
In among all the crying, I see
a burning child on the stove.
The same one as before?
The curtains are full of soot. Well quickly,
we need to escape. Well surely.
No, I watch her burn.
What is it I love about the sound of dogs barking
as smoke rises out the window?
What a complete noise, like a pile of hands clapping.
Another body found burned in the oval,
purple and mystical,
and all around her
peppery crisps in the shape of a heart.
There’s a woman over the road
who moved in when he left.
She has a black little finger
and has been watching me for days.
Her shadow is that of a man’s in the right light.
Sometimes she’s right outside the window
sometimes I think she’s in the house
in the cupboard under the sink
or behind the shower curtain.
I hold her name like grit between my teeth
turning cartwheels by the edge of the stream.
The air is touchy, fibreglass,
summer streams through the trees like a long blonde hair.
I want to grab all the things that make me ashamed
and throw them from the bridge
like how I don’t like the sun at the end of the day,
eating cold cream cake on the dimming porch
in the yellow breeze, lonely,
just thinking up these stories.
So I fling my fork into the bark like a stroppy dictator,
it makes that cartoon stuck-in-wood noise.
I am stuck in the middle of the month (again).
I would like to have some time on my hands
something like a stain.
Happy Birthday floats up to my window
followed by your name, your purple name.
Monstrous Horses
I jumped I lit the noose
on fire, a great lemon
in place of my heart, a start.
I am falling without help
down a steep white cliff
saluting magpies in hope.
I pass two horses stood end to end
making one monstrous double horse.
Off in the distance
I notice with a start
a horizon line of sons
hammering chalk.
The forest beneath them is so green
it is an optical illusion
mounted on foam.
Lunatic Urbaine
The man who loved me
pushed me to the ground
in a pool of white plants.
When we
tell you to stop,
we whispered, you stop,
and the trees are above us
knitting out the sky.
There’s nothing like a man
to serve you pain deep-seared
on a silver dish that rings
when you flick it, your table
gilded and festooned
with international meats,
cured and crusted, each
demanding its own sauce.
I ask to be taken home
but of course I am home,
so I turn my attention elsewhere.
Volcano
A bleak and ferrous opening in the sky
a wound the kind that rots to black
rumbling apart, a doctored element of cloud.
Beneath that, a geography observed from a ship,
an old great state at the base of an eruption
where only girls lived, carbuncled in dust,
caught mid-play and mid-menses, long arms
chastising or rubbing filth on themselves, arched
Simple Men
Under-lit like a driveway, haunted and beech-lined,
obtuse crevices, attention-seeking,
damaged with names they’re unforgivably given.
Deep, apoplectic Daniel, who hides in the wood
sad about a failing relationship with his mother.
For a laugh I told him he was adopted,
brother Daniel, and he beat me to a pulp.
The face of a girl fills up with blood
when she is touched too much
and commits herself to rage.
What is she watching come in over the shore
from the corner of her eye
as she sulks lazily by the large bay window?
A haunted old body, the one she’ll inhabit
that drags up and down the coast.
Nights of Poor Sleep
Dear Former Love,
Meeting you in the first place was great though
I am the girl with chapped cheeks and blue bow
with my breasts taped down
dancing silently on my father’s lap
of course I wake with a start in the
new bedroom
painted blue
in a cacophonous pool of blood
the moon sways over me whitely
too quickly
bordered by trees
in the ghost town where I live
strange feelings overcame me when he left
like the cracking old image of a wave framing a lighthouse
like an octopus crawling on land
he was a god in his blood thirst
looking out of the window, a pre-ghost
I know the look of someone newly murdered
the moon’s trailing over me too quickly
outside the window, trees darkly mask the sky
the sky the thatched colour of jeans
evening coming down like hair snipped over shoulders
everything in place for our inflatable dinner party
we sat courteously as adults, haloed by stained glass
efforts to understand me were lost
like music reverberating under water or a hammock
pinged at one end
my safe word couldn’t reach him with his head at my tail
spanking me pinkly into the crawl space
I wore rose gold rings to impress him
(she got there first)
this was outside my character
Rodeo fun on a Sunday
In the living room is a man who loves me more than the last man
who made me feel like I was falling from a cliff
and if it feels like you’re falling from a cliff
you just might be
awful feeling when the sun begins to thinly shine at dawn
as in the Arctic or on Mars
who knows what the sun’s doing there
my eyes don’t focus completely
giving everything a crescent edge
so when I look into the pupil of my lover
it has to dilate
don’t give up the ghost
I followed him all around Surrey
around the larger parts of an unfamiliar forest
he took me to the cheap parts of Sheen
we made love in a net curtain
it took me hours to lift the pattern from my thigh
it was the only time I wore a blouse
and he blew his nose all over it
suppose just once he tried to impress my father
taking him fishing, pulling up long waders and just striding into the lake
until he’s actually drowning
why will no one put themselves through that for me?
for my long-suffering father
who perambulates in his head across the table
lowering his glasses
he can smell what they’re about to do
like a damn police dog
he drops his head down on his chest
Morning Defeats
I map a constellation
I am a cucumber
made entirely of water
like my face-down sister
made also entirely of water
we’re so full of it
sailors topple off the deck
in wet and dusty mushroom hats
they look like mascots in a doughnut shop
cascading smiling past the portholes
with flags in their pockets
they would have been nice to take home
they just can’t stop looking
at me
What a summer we had
Butter on the wind while
my friends are unprotected
trumpets above and behind the clouds like every painting of heaven
hands up who cries themselves to sleep here
at the memory jogged
of one black leaf on the inside of an arm
a smiling face haunting a cloud
I know there is something still between us
why else would you be so cruel?
the cruel way
you stir a tea
the cruel way you sit elsewhere
it’s too hard not to touch someone’s arm in a way that is
innocent and not innocent
a little squeeze
we use too many materials we don’t own
especially to tell each other we feel fondly
things could have been different but not markedly so
tell me on the phone just once something that will feel like
a small match striking at the base of my neck
the immutable drawing together clichéd and true
You look unwell, my dear
I make everyone jealous I know
when I saunter into the cafe two streets away
turn left turn left again
when I walk in the door
lipstick on my teeth
a pair of pants hanging around my arm
little smacked-on stain
no one talks when I walk in
and I look everyone in the eye
get some ice cream
anyway I go in there sometimes and just fall to my knees
like life is overwhelming when it’s not
everyone looks at me
I’m having problems with my vision, sort of short lines of blue
perhaps becoming blinder
When dawn comes loaded with fear
The night salesmen
throw themselves against the door
and I am covered in dread
they keep me up all night
they pretend
I am asleep
squeeze pamphlets through the letter box
and bellow through the cat flap
my beautiful friend
mottled
torso
framed on the wall
stuck up with tape
I can’t take my eyes off him
I reach
a peak with the night salesmen
fling open the door
and grab one by the throat in a frenzy
he is blind
I spit in his blind eye
it is an affectation
like my own blindness
No last kiss
Lilac keys to the shared front door
little lilac crystal on the shared keyring
lilac leaves of my drooping spider plant
moulting on the bath mat
so it looks like I’ve had my purple period
I wonder which one I might speak to first
boys in the forest, police dog dad
bag-of-sticks body wrapped in plastic in the back garden
I lie to basically everyone
I played a ham-fisted stick-in-the-mud
let him stick it where the sun don’t shine
played games and played pretending we might want to
pee on each other
let him watch my crocodile tears in the loo
played in the plain yellow wallpaper
while everyone tutted, needed to get on with their day
played in the long-grassed meadow
and it didn’t feel as good as I thought it might
played at happiness in a night full of unimaginable grief
and it felt better than I thought it could
outside the window hens click
scuttling around my feet like lizards
losing their legs and growing them back
and changing their names
and losing their spines
And the face in the mirror, no longer familiar
The men in my life, yes, come and go