Kingdomland

  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

  over desks and on the swings, illicitly being.

  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

  in my polka-dot bikini

  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