Kingdomland

I see in them, faces

  stacked on faces

  ~

  Kneeling, hard limestone

  the tower of masks

  wears concern

  and surveillance

  in tribute and desire

  they cannot

  touch themselves

  anxiety around

  self-promotion

  the worthless old

  sits in the darkness.

  To lay down

  and be lovestruck

  out of nowhere

  and then to be

  carved in stone

  and to never take

  your arms away

  from your face

  to never take

  your arms to

  someone’s face

  that is a gift.

  Indecent, the length

  of the shadow

  of the aqueduct

  so dark it nightly

  turns the forest blue

  Prairie Burning

  There is a man

  who circles the perimeter

  with a baby in his arms

  unmoving.

  Locusts burn

  with the silhouettes

  of saints at dusk.

  Saints are in the cloud.

  We are in a dry storm.

  The man extends his circles

  pulling the baby through

  the cactus scrub.

  Look at his melting trainers

  in the heat

  they aren’t what he asked for.

  There are black leather skids

  on the dry-stone wall.

  People in black cloaks run

  out of the corner of your eye.

  A hog turns on a spit.

  The prairie is a terrarium for the blaze

  but the edge is dry of fire.

  It is the height of one season,

  bushes burn.

  A burnt five-year-old

  without eyelids

  turns quick cartwheels

  through the heat wave

  under the big pale sky,

  black and blue.

  The Slim Man

  A landscape unpainted:

  a cold stream of lean black weeds

  leading towards a stile

  and a field tilting up.

  Trees turn to veins against marbly sky

  in the half hour before night.

  During a certain moon

  children are said to have seen

  a slim man walking over the field

  in a low mist, towards the stile,

  leading a girl

  in pale blue pinstripes

  into the glowing pinstripe forest beyond.

  Sometimes he will stop and lean down,

  and scrape the earth,

  then earth and touch are knotted

  for they are both cold.

  No one is scared of him,

  more of the thick-dark brook, drowned roots

  and full night, the pitiful rabbits’

  eyes yellow on the hillside.

  Multiflora

  Was held stationary on the aqueduct

  near the snakeskin hanging from the bridge

  thrown up by kids. And on the other side of the ridge

  a collision of wasps from somewhere in the growth.

  Swimming upstream, insects parch my body.

  The day is an oven. I float outwards

  in a concentric circle. I will know the pattern of your knee.

  I sit by the river and envisage our children.

  My ankles give way to other thoughts,

  thoughts about stealing, objectify me.

  She emerges, caught

  in a decision

  makes her way upwards

  in an initial period of

  waiting. She wears

  suffering on her head

  like sugar on a cake.

  Time isn’t real.

  What weather outside?

  Worms of mould

  in the fruit. Spools

  of dirt in the grooves

  of the hair. Half-light,

  full light, one beacon

  pierces the same time

  as the sun rises, and

  shows up sweet scum

  on the water’s surface

  dappled like albumen.

  I rescue a hazy insect,

  she watches and knows

  I have secrets.

  I fall backwards into

  the fiume, wearing a

  chalk coat, and a heart-skip.

  What will save me.

  I tell her I love them all,

  but she can’t tell me hers.

  Landscape for a Dead Woman

  To be beautiful

  and powerful enough

  for someone

  to want to break me

  up

  into syndicated ripples.

  Later I’ll try

  to rise from these dead.

  laid out on

  a shrine

  a bloodletting woman

  take her to

  the sea

  fog stuffed

  where mayhem

  in the slew

  of interlocking

  waters clarifies

  into a vision; a handprint

  becomes colloidal

  and then she’s gone

  this is what happens

  when a woman dies

  the landscape

  unlocks from its planning

  we are reluctant tenants

  no one else lives here

  we farmed all the grief

  murder is a kind of sorcery

  who cursed us?

  Can we blame the alignment

  of inexplicable circumstances

  or was it my fault?

  I ask as I’m pushed back into the dark

  my mouth a spell of light

  what’s going on out there

  the sinking house and the land

  are to be consumed

  and the sea will obfuscate the shore as she has

  obfuscate our lives

  murder is

  future embarrassment

  mother and sister, qualities

  calcify in the density of bones

  where is she

  when she’s not with me?

  Not back in the old stone kitchen

  prone on a cold wood floor

  when the water’s grey and tactile

  I could lift it up like a blanket

  and find her hiding underneath

  crouched down like a joke

  I didn’t earn any adulthood

  I had it thrust upon me

  she visited once

  and told me

  men have the upper hand

  unbanded her chest

  to reveal rows of wounds

  delivered concomitantly

  my vision

  is scalded and empty

  sweet, insignificant

  chatter in the distance

  a bad husband loitering

  in the kitchen of my mind: damp

  he lives in shadow

  damp, I cannot place his face

  was she alive

  when she lived? Did she wear

  hooves on her feet?

  Did he mistake her for an animal

  when he let blood for the night?

  She is embedded in the walls

  and emerges from the walls

  our memories need flushing

  like a cistern blocked with blood

  I bundle my sister

  up in the cloth

  deliver her to the

  orphanage

  where she will be safer away

  from her murderous family

  where they murder

  each other in kitchens

  great screaming

  certain areas of council do nothing

  I thought I saw her

  and followed her through the stre
ets

  it wasn’t her of course

  I would have done more than that

  I would have brought her back to life

  colossal guilt

  the size of buses end to end

  the size of blue whales spilling from wounds

  a picture book of primary colours

  featuring increments of size

  mean I imagine wounds

  not celebratory hands

  that touch the children’s cake

  we keep it from them

  my sister in the mist

  tugging bones

  where the grass dies

  murder is a flood

  has she gone into liquidation?

  When the ice melts will she be there

  with a plague

  to give to everyone

  she has dissolved

  an egg in acid

  I sit by the lake

  with a rod

  to wait for her

  to come out of the water

  and a novelty postcard arrives

  from wherever she is

  ghosts war in my head

  cryptic and mildew

  counting all the dead women

  putting them in a document

  burn all documents

  rescue the women

  pulling their hair out

  she told the operator

  she couldn’t breathe

  and out to sea, blue breath

  a blue ghost on the doorstep

  but it’s not her

  she is wholly gone

  birds hang like visual disturbance

  flick monstrously from side to side

  bad pile of sand

  no end and no beginning

  water laps at my feet

  Apostles Burning

  I was one burnt daughter

  in a genealogy.

  Stepped into the oil

  spill like a siren

  emerged dyed black

  backed with the wings

  of a tanker’s logo

  jangling stranded

  in the outer ocean

  holding a child

  looking for the perfect

  swell. Fires edging closer

  like dinghies on water.

  Apostles hot and orange,

  citrus milk I can feed her.

  Banshee

  He’ll sit by the window

  at an innocent date

  with wandering hands

  over a port-green stool.

  There’s the kitchen

  where she was murdered

  where she was delivered

  into a weapon with force

  like a small model forester

  axing up plastic logs

  in a red wooden clock

  murdered by a man

  the sanctity of communion

  she was never alone

  the heavy smell of blood

  misted up past the crockery

  and the murdered girls before her

  gathered up in plain cotton

  the scores of her limbs

  and the nub of her treatment

  her hair was a clotted

  pattern of wallpaper

  like a tapestry of rabbits

  and they left with her body

  but do not forgive

  so easily as that.

  Tonight she laughs walking

  towards his dark house

  her head’s a dun lantern

  with split ends uplifted

  her hands are barbed knots

  to take it back

  for she’s fury with a shell

  and she’s petty.

  The old boundary walls

  where she leaned in the summer

  swaying in her peripherals.

  She dons now a grey sheet

  the dusk colour of bonbons

  too seem more like a haunting

  light pools through the mock-glass

  and the door she approaches

  the red door approaches

  The sea flames

  an undercurrent.

  A girl, strange beliefs

  present in the water

  turns through plastic

  holds to the drift

  bathing in the black and

  emergent pond.

  Lungless, she

  caves with the weight

  see the water’s charge

  boil simultaneously

  as the girls float up

  to the billowing ceiling.

  About the Author

  Rachael Allen was born in Cornwall and studied at Goldsmiths College. She is the co-author of Jolene, a book of poems and photographs with Guy Gormley, and Nights of Poor Sleep, a book of poems and paintings with Marie Jacotey. She has received a Northern Writers’ Award and an Eric Gregory Award, and was made a Faber New Poet in 2014. She is poetry editor at Granta and co-founder of the poetry press clinic and online journal tender.

  Copyright

  First published in 2019

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2019

  All rights reserved

  © Rachael Allen, 2019

  The right of Rachael Allen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–34112–2