This isn’t about God,
the stained-glass legends of broken wheels, the barrowload
of miracles, or the dinner-plate halo they will nail to your head.
Under the gospel,
the truth of it: woman answers back, ends up dead.
The last pangolin
Taking a scale between thumb and forefinger, they peel the creature.
Leaf by brutal leaf, as one might strip an artichoke,
they tug it bare. Set their teeth to its sharp
and bitter edges, scrape off the smallest
lick of meat at the root. Only when
the final petal is torn away,
do they discover
there is no
choke, no
living thing,
no answer.
Extinction events
It fell before first flight. Nest to gutter in a dirty vertical,
a rook nestling stretches on the tarmac.
Skin pockmarked with the stubble of ungrown feathers,
still slippy with the lining of the shell’s cracked fontanelle.
Eyes roll dull coins. Leg arrested in mid-step,
it scrapes with raptor claws,
as though the strata of the pavement split
and spread out a fossil dinosaur in miniature.
The stretched sack of its belly bulges
with the busy tenancy of maggots. Black, blue, magenta;
the entire paintbox of disgust. It cocks
a medusa head, wears its beak like the mask of a plague doctor.
~
It will be years before every part
of me is extinguished. A piecemeal dying-out.
It begins with the certain lock
of names to faces; nouns to things.
The flight of fancy grows clumsy, stutters.
Each small forgetting a chick elbowed
out of the mind’s nest. That idea I had
five minutes past: going, gone. The space gawks.
I cling, frantic against the unfeathering
of the intellect; memory plucked to shivering gooseflesh.
Helpless as a hatchling, with the urge to fly
and only stumps with which to do it.
A flightless bird, I lurch through bare vocabulary.
Soon, this corvus frugilegus will be reduced
to bird, to flying thing, to thing, to lacuna.
Words without wings. I mimic Icarus:
quills slip their moorings, stream, as I claw
at tumbling air, plummet in a reverse evolution
from adult to juvenile, juvenile to nestling,
all the way back to egg. I squat inside the bland
shell of the skull, contents slippery.
The correct hanging of game birds
Rostrum
Select old, wild birds. Beware harsh beaks, horned spurs, claws toughened by years of defiance. Pierce the beak. Hang by the neck, the feet. Each man has his taste. Hook and hang them long enough to conquer disobedience.
Syrinx
Keep them in the dark. Convert the cellar into a hanging room: a stamped dirt floor to absorb the moisture they shrug off, dense walls to absorb sound. Keep your birds separate. Even when dead, their warmth communicates from breast to breast, stirs discord.
Pectoral girdle
Permit yourself the luxury of appreciation. This bird is yours, now. Dawdle on the ruffled collar, handsome as a rope of pearls around the throat; cheek blushed with pretty shadow; eye ringed with the purple-blue of bruising. Jewel plumage so thick it weighs down the wings. You can’t imagine how she flapped or flew.
Breast
Pluck right away and you experience the thrill of naked flesh, but the body will dry out. Your bird is ruined. Wait three days, maybe seven. Then, and only then, strip off the feathers. Patience. Flesh and innards need time to ripen. Sublime flavour is attained when skin loosens its grasp on muscle. She oozes oil and perfume.
Rump
A gentle incision. Slice skin, not meat. Slide in up to the wrist and spread your fingers. Unpeel her body like wet fruit. Relish satin texture, the greenish shimmer of perfect ripeness. Keep going. Fillet scraps from bone, a job less bloody than you expect. Persistence rewarded with flesh that yields to your authority.
Lesser coverts
Lock the dog in the yard, to stop it lapping up the puddles that collect under the carcases. Ignore the neighbours complaining they can’t sleep. The smile that shuts them up faster than any bellowed argument. The way they shrink away.
Cloaca
Time passes without needing to pay it much attention. Nights in the cellar, waiting for your birds. Their toes dripping, their eyes glazed. All resistance drained from them. The silence is balm, the scent delectable and rare. If only the dog would stop barking.
You can begin at almost any point
You are drinking enough to disappear. You, your body, everything you want to transform into nothing. All the women have gone. There are no bedclothes, no quilt, no arms to hug comfort. Find this bar again. A different bar. Sit. Drink. Add sugar. Bring aspirin. Bring me another beer. What do you have? Yes. Yes. Yes.
Wicker men
You wear the years like cages. Lashed tight with your toys, your wives, your kids, the faiths that make you hard and holy. You bellow how it’s unfair, none of it’s your fault. You’d show the whole damn world, if only someone would come and set you free. But there’s no lock on the door. The gaps between the bars are big enough to squeeze through, always have been. The gasp and tickle of smoke. You sit, whining, waiting to catch fire.
They are an oddness
When he gets home, he slides you into a goldfish bowl.
You think there’s no way you can fit, what with the tail
and fronds, but the water accommodates like a glove.
Morning and evening, he shakes a plastic tub. Food falls
in a drift of salty confetti. You flick your clever tongue
and catch each flake. You grow long and sleek.
He has to move you into the sink; by the end of the week,
the bath. He feeds you sardines from a tin. Holds out a fork,
says here comes the aeroplane.
When your lips close around the tines, you taste sweat
on his fingers. You eat, and grow. Your tentacles climb
the tiles around the tub. You pool the floor with slime.
At night, you rest your head upon his knee. He combs your hair
and whiskers, smoothes the creases from your frills
where they have wedged against the sides of the bath.
You wrap your tongue around him, squeeze till he gasps.
He gazes in wonder at the marks you leave,
his tongue small and lacking in muscle.
Phrenologist
Take my advice: develop a smaller skull.
It can be done, and though it’s best to start
in childhood, even adults can force the mind
into submission. Strap wooden planks
to the sides of the head,
where bone is most open to persuasion.
Bind tight. Tighter. Squeeze out all that is undesirable:
ideas, intelligence, the daily effort
to put one word before the other.
There is little room for thought, but
consider the consolation: to float free
of that oppressive weight upon your shoulders.
Avoid dissent, any rapid shaking of the head.
A modest tilt of acquiescence
will stave off breakage. Treat yourself
as porcelain. You will chip easily.
But look at the pretty flowers around your rim,
The gilding, the pleasing ornament!
Eczema
Stretched to breaking point, she splits
along the seams.
Limbs littered with a dot-to-
dot that crusts knuckles, elbows,
all the
fractures of the body
with scabbed lava. She is a fault
zone, trembling with forces that simmer
beneath the surface.
All day, she jails its heat. Slathers cream
to silence a furnace that tests each inch
for weakness,
poised to break out and brand her arms
with grafitti that betrays what’s been forbidden
to speak, to be.
She itches to be a smooth girl with quiet skin
and expectations, slide through the world
without snagging
the corner of anyone’s attention. But
the undesirable is leaking through; won’t sit on its hands,
keep its trap shut.
She’s wearing thin. Scared to read the angry scrawl;
that it’ll tell her what she doesn’t want to know
and can’t unwrite;
that she’s the same inside as out:
beastly, bloody, terrifying. At night, she surrenders.
Rakes herself raw.
What’s inside sharpens its claws
and scratches back, mirror-writing that seems to spell
unpeel; escape
the pelt that binds her silent.
Planetary wobble
Earth refuses to draw clean circles. In a seven year itch,
she shimmies round the sun with an inbuilt deviation
from the true. What is truth? Not colouring inside the lines,
nor the fine print of little laws. Her fractal swing delights
in shapes swerving off-kilter, a rock-and-rolling calligraphy
of bad behaviour along the scroll of orbit. She sloshes oceans from neap
to spring; a dizzy, uncircled dervish swirl, close to God.
I am a whipped top that only spins a moment before
it topples from equilibrium; the gravity of doubt skews
my axis and I can’t stand straight. Yet I will go on, tilted.
Long exposure
(Upway Wishing Well, Weymouth, 1904)
If asked, they’ll say it’s purely for the postcard photographer,
who arranged the scene: over there a chap with an unlit pipe,
a mother and daughter parked next to the well’s mouth
and the pair of them, Miss Jansell and Miss Nellie Meek,
snarled up at the kissing gate. They embrace
for the long wind and snap of the shutter. Three minutes,
they hold the kiss. Tomorrow, they will go back,
Miss Jansell and Miss Nellie Meek,
and wish again, and kiss; without onlookers,
photographer, the clank and rattle of equipment.
They will keep wishing. Kissing through the years of hiding
in long grass, behind bushes, in closets, in plain sight.
Shoulder pressed to shoulder, pale-knuckled against all
that would put them asunder. Till everything
that twists fear into law unwinds.
When time comes to unknot concealment, shrug off
its whalebone cage. Till they can put an end to wishes;
stand up, brush off their skirts, and act.
The dark at the end of the tunnel
A woman walks upon the ocean floor.
Her skirt balloons around her legs
with the slow grace of a manta ray.
Her skin ripples, undulates.
Her stride is a keel, her chin a prow. She cleaves the thickness.
There was light.
There was a beach. Children, digging and screaming.
The filthy laughter of gulls, reek of bladderwrack.
There was a beginning: a paddle to the ankle mark. To calf. To knee.
There was the first gulp of brine.
The discovery of new ways to breathe.
Dappled sand she could sieve between her toes.
Reefs of jewel coral, sequin shoals of fish.
These are ghosts her hands swim through.
She’s been walking underwater for so long that time moves to a
different reckoning.
Her way is lit by the phosphorescence of angler fish.
Her companions are gulper eels that pause in their gnawing
of whale carcases.
She no longer employs the agony of air in, air out.
Each footstep stirs grey clouds of ancient silk. Puffs of smoke to
mark her passing,
towards a chasm where light loses all memory of itself.
Fox rising
Little hand that cuffs my wrist, under the table, where no-one
can see. Little finger that lays its tongue along the inside of
forearm, tip inching towards elbow crook, where blood beats.
Sniff out the pulse. Tickle you under there.
Ah, my song of
songs, my honeycomb, my bumble-bee, my pincushion, my
red letter day. No harm can come when I hold tight. Let us
play a game. Round and round the garden, like a –
Shh.
What made you say her name? Don’t think of that shivery
ripple, that shaking leaf, that split chestnut, that quaking mud
puddle, that cracked window, that wishing well with eyes.
Don’t think.
Don’t say her name or you’ll call her. Do you
want to be the one who’s named, blamed for the whistle of
her whine and how it blew down all our houses?
How can she
rise, when foxes cannot climb? How, when the moon bites her
tail each month and does not let her go? How, when she is
stuck fast in night’s bitumen fist?
What you mean to say is, hope
is rising and with it, all our salvations. The fox is defeated.
Chained in the pit two thousand years and two thousand
more. The fox cannot rise, cannot disturb a dream, not by so
much as a whimper.
Child, the lamps are bright. All is well.
Nothing stirs the shadows beneath your bed, nor flickers at
the foot of the stairs, nor hovers behind the door, breathing its
hot breath when the lights go out.
I hear no whining, unless
it be your own. I see no copper glint of eyes unless they be
yours. I smell no fox-reek unless it be you. Are you fox?
Do you want me to call fox on my own child?
Ah, my hinny, my coo, my ickle, my lickle, my lap and
liquorice. There is nothing to fear. Nothing, my babby, my
bonny, my bubble, my squeak. Mama could never be angry
with her pickle, her pie, her cockle, her clam.
Now, here comes
your supper to light you to bed. Open wide. Here comes the
bear, the wolf, the tiger.
A child eats what it is told and when. Eat.
You must. This is my body. Given for you. From the time when
you were too young for an imagination. Eat.
Listen. I will show
you the fox and then you will be afraid no longer. See, here
she is. She is not your fox, but she is mine. There is more than
one. Put your hand upon her, and believe.
Do mothers tell lies
to their children?
Hush. There is no puss in this well, no jack in
the green, no wolf at the door. Listen to me and not to the fears
that come at 4am, the hour when those desirous of dying paddle
away on an outbreath. Don’t go with that crew. Stay with mama,
between my breasts where the milk stands sticky in the nipples.
You
are being very foolish. Do you want to see mama cry? Come.
Hush your nonsense and take hold. Give me your paw.
I am stronger.
She can pull all she likes. See, I can snap her in half with a flick
of my fingers. I will never let you go. I am strong as a whirlpool,
wide as an ocean and my tide will hold you safe in my harbour.
She cannot
have you. No-one else can have you, not even yourself.
Quicksand
You wake from nightmare, throat glugging sludge.
She’s already in the kitchen, arranging plates and cups.
It was an overnight stay, but that was a while ago.
A week? You search for the wall calendar.
Remember those Saturday morning TV serials? she purrs,
shuffling cutlery. The hero always got stuck
in quicksand. Flailing his arms.
Words scrolling across the screen. To Be Continued.
You’re sure you never mentioned your nightmare.
You tilt a teaspoon towards the light. Your reflection flickers.
I dreamed of you last night, she says.
You press your lips together to stop
the question falling out. The kettle boils. Steam blurs
the window. The outside world disappears.
She arranges your favourite mug in front of you, and smiles.
Coffee, yes. You always feel better
after coffee. You lift the cup and flood your mouth
with a choke of liquid, dense with grounds.
Sleep of reason
For seven days I have not slept
more than an hour at a time; two on a good night.
I eavesdrop the fizzing lullaby
of the emergency lighting,
the shrieking wheels of the commode,
the machine that beeps my vitals every hour.
Night after wide-eyed night I’m defleshed
of the sine waves of dreaming that mark us human.
The nurse at the foot of my bed sighs,
flicks her pen along a line of boxes, strikes me from
her list of known mammals. De-classified, I drop off
the edge of this flat earth into a sleep of monsters
where dragons stretch their claws. I am no longer
mapped, safe. I lurch on insect legs, stripped
to an exoskeleton, the shrivelled thorax
of a wasp where my belly used to swell;
ribs tight as beetle wings, mouthparts clicking.
What Girls Do in the Dark Page 2