while outside the window insects thrum
there are a mass of clovers
tangling up in something
my cup of bedside water is very still
this is just what happened to me
I suppose it happens to many others
if you wear pink dungarees
at an amiable age
I’m trying to reach you
from my position beetled in this stranger’s bedroom
girl legs up towards the familiar cream ceiling
I’m taped up with masking and broken-hearted
in the end he would barely touch me
were I to stay long enough to scrape dark butter
onto toast
mad and thatched
something skinny as the passageway between lines
a concertina of worry
I’d leave them this
Grow up
girl in
silver. No
adult jewellery
no adult
feelings
compromise
is a word
that belongs
in the desert.
I despise
men in
hard hats
entering me
singing as
they do so
as though
they’re at the
pulpit. Put
her in the
river. I will
decide where
she ends up
guilty as
ever, filled
up with salt.
Many Bird Roast
I came in, dandy and present
arguing for a moratorium on meat
of the kind splayed out on the table, legs akimbo
like a fallen-over ice skater skidding on her backside
there are dogs in the outhouse and all over the world
that we do not eat
and one small sparrow in a pigeon in a grouse in a swan
that we will certainly eat
overlooking all the drama, with as many eyes as a spider
that we’ll cut in two
and the compacted layers of the various meats
will collapse away dreamily as a rainbow melts down
into the marsh where it came from
slipping meat from the bone
onto a specially designed knife
there’s a call out for plates –
I’m the only one with a sense of outcry
someone says, you weren’t like this when it was broiling away
smelling like your history, smelling like
the deep skin on your knee after playing in the sun all day
skinned with good dirt
and your under-blood just showing through
smelling like warm dry firs after burning and the outdoors
after fireworks and Novembers after tea
you eat and smell like the rest of us
dirty rat under your armpit
dirty bird in your stomach
and birds fell down the chimney with thwacks into buckets
and we got so poor we had to eat them too
strange cockatoos and once a brilliantly lit pure white dove
that we kept in a hutch with a small pot of ink
and when we let it out
it wasn’t so much a raven as just a plain black dove
ready to cook, and with superstition, I learnt to.
Sweet’n Low
A BBQ in the barracks
for a saintly boy
his ears like caravan antennae.
Afternoon weather is
generic, like ice on the
steamy road metaphor,
not the eclipsing
originality of
an elephant.
I am so angry
for the octopus
swallowed in kitsch restaurants.
Quit it,
though I still wear the skin of animals
every day.
Beef Cubes
hot tight Penny
that girl at school
who put talc on her face
and sausage blush
on her cheeks
was a meat clown
Terry felt through her jean shorts
told everyone she was wet
push him off your lap
we told her, thong showing
brown squares in the pastry bin
as she’d been sick
she was incredibly thin
and kept getting thinner
like when you turn a kind of mirror
till you’re flat. Muscle memory
from her panic attacks
kept her off the beach
where the whale cut in half
exudes its yellow fat
and the tourists come
stroked and swollen
on its back, like you
hot tight Penny
its fin a Hot Pocket
people milling as the sun sets
laying down blankets
one beef patty turning on the grill
by the large blue carcass
by the large blue sea
The Indigo Field
Two bees hang
around a severed horse’s head
forgetting that they’re supposed to
pollinate
flowers instead of
the roughly opened gland
of a mammal.
Black pennies
with cow faces
down a black well.
You stood no chance
of being born
I tell myself, as the sea
cannibalises.
It manages to forgive itself
every day, without visions
of the baby
making her way towards me
across the indigo field.
Seer
There she lies aching over enamel,
a blood bath in the city. An animal
hounded, an ingrate up to the gates,
ungracious house guest, keening,
a dog’s deep growling on the turn.
The green bank that insists on being
revealed down the insides of legs,
like the muttering stranger
who jumps out from behind a tree.
The white ocean spreads itself
like the badly iced top of a cake
seen through the smeared Plexiglas
of a cheap hotel restaurant.
I grate flesh into garlanded toilet water,
rearrangements of a desiccated sky.
A sound pooled in water, as oil pools
in water, a ghost caught in the layers.
Intestinal scorching, a stomach of shavings.
Being haunted by a baby is worse
than you’d think. I don’t want her,
an ingrown ghost, intermittent horror,
the same horror of no stars on a clear night
that means you see nothing in the dark.
The kind of dark you find inside a body.
The kind of darkness you find a body in.
Sick honeysuckle on the air smell
and all around the hotel, rural noises.
The sky is wet with blood and solvent,
sinewy like a fish spine, illuminated
with stars like bone-ends. If you climb
onto the roof and watch this weather
from the weather vane, to hold this
poor memory up, like a sacrifice
to the firmament, you will be exposed.
Dad the Pig
with a Snickers
in his trough.
I dreamed this poem
knee deep
in silk –
I mean silo.
Slice him up
there’s a vacancy
in the sky
and complacency
in the sty.
Who’s useful after
that
vasectomy anyway?
Someone painted him
in pigeony colours
everyone knows
they’re the worst
crayons
(they’d run out
of flesh pencil
well it is the rarest
colour in
the tin).
Ball him up
like an egg
careful of his
front bits
wobbling.
His turkey neck
sack like a
dangling
testicle
stretched down
to the dirt in
blow-job pose
escaped man
fallen to the sand
on his knees
in prayer pose
pinched and dead
puffer fish
on the end of a line
in its last
breath pose.
At night Mam
dreams of taut
hot pigs
bullish and red
with blue veins.
She wears him
calls him
the big holdall
keeps him in the loft
only takes him out
when we go camping.
Porcine Armour Thyroid
I am a gland, the smooth opal gland
of a pig, who is bubbly with glands
and the glands torn open in this pig’s
shorn neck look like droplets of sperm
on the end of your glans. I eat the glands
of pigs for breakfast, and I take a few
in pills each night, slipping down my throat
a smooth oblong, like oysters or snot.
I rub the loose oil glands in my hands
to moisturise, pale mermaid’s purses
salted like eyeballs, like lychees, and then
I bathe in some glands, slipping round
each other, the miscreant lump under skin
a gland enlarged with the promise of sickness
grey and portentous, a gland cut open
and placed within another gland creates
a geode of glands, the colour of bad livers
the smell of bad lungs, full of poor white
blood cells, or good white blood cells
or the blood work of a pig, whatever’s
farthest, most holy, to the ground.
Cravendale
Purblind monkey
purblind fatted cow
waiting in the queue for the contract
made on her behalf
low in the muddy sundown
their moans create the dusk
not the other way around
stinking path up to the freezer
further up still from the abattoir
the thin incision on her leg
so she’ll kneel before walking
on the plates of her knees
up the old gravel road
a cow in slow and silent
moonlight, grass in her ear
no cow is really a mother
but to milk in the air
or air as milk
or milk in her eye
like a hot blue steam room
holding worlds of fat
mysterious for our benefit
in pictures of the quaintest
traditions cream is tugged
into pails
while in the background
pyres burn on
her low down warm front
puddles on the gravel
cow, eye as a creed
or the look into your eye she makes
a bond, you imagine
moving past you on her knees
caved in from the walk
but laud the pole
that mighty design
like a bolt through the head
looking up at me
from the field of sheep
as I go by – he’s the advert
at the window
as I’m falling straight down
Crying girl
in the canopy
branch held
unstable
a face drawn
pendant-
shaped, from
the bark
marks
how like
a tree is
a woman
crumbling
with age
conversations
inaudible
without a
stethoscope
to the forest
floor and
even then
we whisper.
The Girls of Situations
History holds the incorrect theories of the sea and how they don’t fall off the land, made up by men. Small clouds align. Theories of worship. Women’s bodies collect material the way metals accrue in organs. The accumulation of chemical residue, the red bricks of the day in a woman’s chest like weights on a diver ungracefully stomping into the lake.
Behind me, a genealogy of red-cheeked maids in maroon-check pinafores. Not a hair out of place, no boarding school narrative, babies shooting from them, straightening beds, nursing while smoking, in labour with rosacea burns, hairs on their breasts wet with the strain. From them I have taken yellow hands and knees, arthritic from kneeling to scrub.
The man he tells you he is not tells you to get an abortion. I live in skirt-behaviours round the social club, where men and cheap beer will spin you till you’re sick. Governance is bountiful other than for the young girl who swims out to sea for her reckless behaviour. I make my face white and orange for the jewellery I expect to own. A mimic octopus might be many things but it cannot mimic me.
I stayed with a man after work who kept tarantulas in the loft space. I had on my mint deli uniform and my face was grey. I cut cheese all day long and ham on an industrial slicer. I didn’t want to see the bastard black legs of the largest tarantula, he called it King, it slept in a plastic container with air holes at the top
and my protests were nothing down the rattling metal pull-down stairs where he came with the wobbling box in hand, how sad it actually was to see the spider uselessly point his legs in the air as if to sense a threat in this house with a Disney princess quilt and frieze for his six-year-old daughter who stays each Saturday, we don’t talk about her, he hides the spiders when she comes around, I am not enough to have them hidden for, the blanket of my apron is a pouch for King and in the dirt of his kitchen I would like to go home.
We chew processed meat in the grand old hall, my hand on a gilded bannister. Above a musical washboard, they hang like ceramic angels, faces chipped, hands chipped with warts from galvanised steel and other kitchenalia.
My mother folding tumble dryer tubes next to the sleeping baby while detergent wends through her arteria, replicating in the blood and gathering as a bright yellow crud in the historical river, brown toxins shared down the gene pool.
Too young to work, but still changing beds in the early hours for a holiday cottage foaming at the mouth for a future untenable, stealing biscuits from a tin. A lousy future that taunts itself on the end of a string, composting from the inside out like a Halloween pumpkin gone bad. I will ask my mother to push me through the ivory gates. I will raid the box of coupons for an answer. Lost to the coins kept in the Steradent tin. I will steal from my own mother to make myself feel richer, and smoke her old cigarettes to make myself sicker, become impregnated with ideas and resist her own impregnation, cut anything out of me that starts to grow in there.
Up the chimney and towards the field, a stark bright woman in glowering dusk wears blinding white, and like a fish she sheds herself, and in her hand, she holds something small, ungrippable.
Remedies
Seek god’s face in the pustule of a teenage girl
whose wrists smell like table sugar
whose hand you hold
; under the green and white striped awning
of the beach cafe. Sand blows into ham sandwiches
while distemper accumulates at sea.
Green parsley and an excess of vitamins
we whisper remedies out of habit.
If we are passing through the water
and the water is delivering us from evil
forgiving us our trespasses, as we forgive
the cramping tide and waves
we might eventually enjoy grainy tea
in cardboard containers
and look forward to late at night
her arm stretched across me
pressing into my stomach and counting down
the space between waves
a best friend with green eyes
as shallow as a harbour pool.
Tower of Masks
Chisel at a
bout of stone
head of hair
picked from
rock, incorruptible
in among
the citizenry
she is framed
cherubic against glass
and people congregate
like eyes on
the end of a stalk
picked out
from the crowd
a reclining stone
the woman
is fuller with
her captured rock
inside the modulating
curve, the dish
of her hip
puckered as
flesh is, orbed
and facing up
~
Girl in the shadows
still and marble
the preferred stone.
Girl with a full old
and baroque heart
remains stationary.
Girl with pain in the shins
deep muscle burning
delinquent, mineral eyes
nothing like anything
but a tower of lips
now I am obsessed.
Blue expression of trees