Dry hours whirr as I practice night vision
with composite eyes, smacking headlong over and over
into each hard bright morning, tough as plate glass.
Personal aphelion
I dawdle amongst absences. Men in white coats point out
crab constellations on the X-ray’s sky, calculate the impact
of radiation; the glare of a sun that sears mass, flesh, optimism.
Bare-headed, I stumble round the ward, a lump of ash and ice
held together by movement. Blunder from misery too cold to calculate,
an occasional flirt with brightness, into an Oort cloud of unknowing.
At the end of hope’s orbit, I uncentre childhood’s
Ptolemaic cosmos with its selfish heart; shake off its myths
of immortality, inviolate faith. Trace the trajectory of sickness,
measure my continuance in millionths. Learn smallness,
how each cell makes new skin, new blood, new muscle. Discover
the curvature of space and time, a gravity strong enough
to haul my little cinder back. How each wound finds healing
in the opposite of itself, how something that is not finishing
bends itself into a return. Permit darkness, find light.
Dancing the plank
4am, ward-scuppered with all the other wrecks;
sick and storm-bowed by Cisplatin, salt in your veins.
Cling the rigging of the drip and hoist upright, sway
port to starboard. Build your sea legs.
So, you’re dry-docked; mapped with poison
from wrist to elbow: blue anchors of old bruises,
red of heart tattoo. You are still Anne Bonney, Mary Read.
You’ve not sailed this far to scrape. Lean
into the swell of your rickety bed: peg-legged,
bilge-breathed, split-masted. Screw your eye
to the horizon and stagger
this day’s plank. Kick up your heels.
Scar
Hesitation of flesh, you punctuate my forehead;
flick your apostrophe, your accent. Quote without
its unquote, you open and hang
void.
Crack in the window
of the skull, you leak memory.
You are not
the tick of a teacher’s pen that marks a piece of work
well done. Not X on the treasure map, a spit
on the dice and roll a lucky seven. Not
smart alec drumcrash punchline.
You are not
the end of the world.
You are
the narrow squeak,
thorn reminded of its crown,
swipe of lamb’s blood on the lintel and the whistle of wings;
scrape of magpie claw as it roosts, scanning the treeline
for a mate to raise its stake from sorrow to joy.
Little glyph, scored on the brow’s crease. My Braille
of stubborn bloody-mindedness. My dint.
Self-portrait as Halley’s comet
I pick a spot so deep in the nothing
of the map it lacks a name;
fling the pebble of myself south
over the Tropic of Cancer.
Think I’ve hidden in a place too clever
to be unearthed; hope my black ice will shrivel in Sahara glare.
Like Halley, I go round and round
in patterns of freeze and burn; drag debris
I swear is negligible but leaves a filthy trail.
I chase my tail, learn nothing except
how to tear myself apart in tiny increments. Stuck in the rut
of orbit, I mistake flight for healing.
However many times I change
city, country, continent, I circle the same sun
unable to achieve escape velocity.
Perihelion is the closest a comet gets to the fire before managing to escape
1986 apparition was the least
favourable on record the worst
viewing for Earth observers
for the last 2,000 years
Khartoum, 1986. Pressed between man
and concrete balcony, I wait
for promised fireworks. To spark belief
this trapped feeling is flirtation,
I swig arak, the local firewater
that strafes the throat with gasoline.
I’m just a girl who can’t believe she’s here
until his attention sketches me from smoke
to solid. Alcohol mimics fullness,
but drains far too quickly through my punctures.
There.
He smears a finger across the sky, points at a blur
too dim for the name comet.
No. There.
Halley. I thought we had a deal. You’d
stage a perfect flyby, a bells-and-whistles
shawl of flame across the sky, and I would
toe the narrow line of girl-wants-boy. But
you’re playing peekaboo on the wrong
side of the sun, ripping up the book on
stellar etiquette and bending orbit to your
own kinked rules, while I’m trudging a
half-life in the mud of other people’s
fairy tales. One day my prince will, etc.
I tip back another mouthful, gag, see stars of sorts. Out there,
Halley is trying to get the message through my signal crackle;
remind me how once upon a time
I splashed outside the lines;
didn’t know it was
a mess, and didn’t care. Before
I learned the science of satisfaction
was a man to fill my void with fitting colour.
Frightened of what life is like on other planets,
I hogtied to the safe trajectory of marriage, husband, happy ever.
orbital eccentricity
deviates from a perfect circle irregular shape
Halley orbits the sun in the opposite direction
to the planets
Imaginary lines drawn in the sky.
No straight path through the universe;
not for Halley, not for me. Size of
a moon, and I couldn’t see I was
kissing men to inoculate against
a gravity pulling in the opposite
direction. Running halfway round
the globe to achieve the impossible,
escape velocity from my queer core.
Late for his own perihelion, Halley skirts the thin breath of Mercury;
dodging asteroids, sprinkling meteors like kisses.
A bearded beauty teetering the tightrope,
he is all kinds of unruly. Has had
ten thousand revolutions to
imperfect his bona to vada
your dolly shriek up and
down the back alley
of the solar system,
and I have
just the
one.
its dynamics cha otic
and unpredictable on long timescales
veering from orbit
Tonight or never.
On Halley’s return I will be dust
that sifts the space between worlds.
Can keep shredding myself
with repetition
of what I don’t want,
don’t need; or accept
I’m erratic,
path spiced with deviation.
as Halley approaches the Sun, it expels
jets of sublimating gas from its surface
which knock it off its orbital path
great enough
to significantly alter orbit
Man pours another shot, swirls the oily puddle. It reeks
of petrol. He leans in; laughs: Baby can I light your fire?
No to one more for this road. I am not locked into
the pull of a sun that will one day destroy me
.
The sky is a blank page on which to sketch new charts;
off the map, a long way from a perfect circle.
freed from the comet’s icy core
jets of volatile material burst outward
the tail completely
breaks
off
Dark Matter
The night sky over Darfur overwhelms
with stars; so burdened, there are plans to cull
a quarter. A third. More. They will prune back
the constellations to chief brightnesses –
the named, the mapped – burn off the stubble
of the small, the feeble, the unclear.
Torch the unimportant to cinders.
They will dam the Milky Way, divert
its flow to those who appreciate fine light;
leave the star-field uncluttered
for Lords of the Empty Quarter:
Antares, Altair, Arcturus; extending
ashy vacancies between these oases
in the night’s new desert.
Her name means Electricity
The wall of the student residence in Khartoum
is painted with a red and white sign. Nour pronounces it
Koo-Ka Koo-La, the blood and bone croak
of a bird of paradise shoving out its elbows.
I wonder why she coughs each time she calls me
until it clicks; it is a glottal stop,
an invisible letter lodged in the throat of her alphabet.
She asks the meaning of my name. I embellish:
star of the sea, flower of ocean, memory,
like the game of three statements: two truths, one lie.
Star-maps assure these night lights are the same as home.
Maia, Merope, Alcyone. I am overwhelmed by the magnitude
of light, names, distance between things that stand like sisters.
The correct digging of latrines
The schools are shut tomorrow: Sudanese Armed
Forces Day or some such. We hole up
in Mike’s compound; it gets hairy
when the local lads start waving
their dad’s farm tools, or Kalashnikovs.
They’ll be back at their desks come Monday,
raising polite hands when I ask about past
participles. In the tight flicker
of the kerosene lamp we play
the drinking game: this week’s most exciting
illness. Rupert wins with hepatitis.
My threadworms barely get a mention.
The roof beams tick with beetles. We get slaughtered
on wine made from sugar cane, debate
the bleary merits of long-drop versus
short-drop toilets, how fast we could dig
one, right now, tonight. Mike dabs his forehead
(malaria, runner-up) and says he doesn’t give a shit
about hygiene; he’s not staying
in this godforsaken hole a moment longer
than he has to. We fall about.
Rupert is the one to start it, grabbing
a spade. His eyes glow orange, like fires
seen at a distance. We’re too pissed
to scoop more than a shallow trench.
Mike throws up and lies in it, groaning.
I can’t stand for laughing. Flat out, watching
the stars swim, my intestines crawling with worms.
Goods to declare
At airport security, I set off alarms. Over the limit
with excess baggage; mistakes I packed into the past two years.
I upend the hourglass of my shoe, dust the red channel with Sahara.
Flip my passport to the photograph; it presses
its mouth to cellophane. Names, numbers blur
with the ink of time and distance. The guard pouts,
tries to put his finger on what has shifted. He swabs
my suitcase for ghosts as I rack my brains: the difficulty
of an answer to did you pack this bag
when I’m not the woman I was, not by a third. I am part-
smuggled; bloodstream a migrant community of cells
that have renewed, been replaced. Familiar, yet dislocated.
The customs officer seeks heat in my armpits,
between my thighs. He insinuates his fingers
through my clothing. The seams are sewn with desert.
I surrender their contraband; shake stars onto the sealed linoleum.
Biography of a comet in the body of a dog
All flap and gallop off the leash, it careers
in a wild orbit round the solar system. The sweep
of its tail makes skittles of doubt; it digs holes
through the wounded parts of joy
to the other side of despair. Every time
I toss hope away it brings it back, drops it
at my feet, tongue drooling a glittering rope.
On cinder nights when breath knocks hollow breath, it soars,
heart on fire, chasing squirrel stars it can never catch.
Auto-da-fé
Comets are not victims of their orbits.
The star round which they swing
neither rescuer nor persecutor. Their ring-a-rosie
is no procession of flagellants
lurching on bloodied knees towards the pyre.
I lay down the cat o’ nine tails. Unlock
the scold’s bridle, the girdle of barbed wire,
life as a succession of Ash Wednesdays.
Raise my forehead from dirt, learn fire
that is not immolation. Stand up. Dance.
Plunge
She pumps the sink, biceps clenched. Down there, the shunt
of chicken fat, a panicked nest of hair, the gristly glue of promises,
fag ends from when she gave them up, dinners scraped off the plate.
The hotel rooms they stayed in but never slept,
the corner she painted herself into, a mulch of bruises
from all those doors, bleach to make lies white again.
She ought to dump caustic soda down the hole; ought to
pickaxe the tiles masking rotten concrete, dismantle the whole system
and riddle the pipes with one of those steel snakes that rip muck to shreds.
Stargazer
Everywhere, there are bursts of radiance: faces that orbit
the bed at visiting hour; dwarf spots on the CAT scan, hot
as bullet holes. Sit down. Adjust to the vertigo tilt
of old words like spread, outlook, time. Doctors
murmur the names of new constellations
– astrocyte, hippocampus, glioblastoma – and calculate
the growth of nebulae; this rising tide of cells that climbs
the Milky Way of the spine to flood your head with light.
Now that you are not-you
and have satisfied the finger-check of pulse
at throat and wrist
ear to the chest
mirror to the lips
and you’re done with the settle and sigh of blood
into the body’s pockets
muscles relaxing in their last outstretch
the peaked hiccup of the red line becalmed
cells are climbing the spine’s rope trick
up to where the brain is dizzy with electrons
like fireflies stoppered in a jar
and dying is the slow unscrewing of the lid
to release your dashing flutter of energies
as you unravel
shoot across the universe in lovely disorganisation
going
going
never gone
There is no there there
Universe encompassed on a blackboard. Arrowtip
of chalk traces perfect circle; path planted
with signposts (sun, planets, asteroids)
so that a comet cannot
lose its way, t
here
and back again.
I stay behind
to wipe away
powdered certainties.
Open the window, shake dust.
The comet shrugs off alphabets, textbooks, fingerposts,
pasts and futures. Eludes expectation. Continues, outwards.
The devil’s in them
Past Slack Top, a cairn of bramble; leaves scorched
to charcoal by November gales. Berries clench
red fists, too late to ripen into black.
I jam my mouth with fruit; wedge teeth with seeds.
Pray for devilment to spark fire into this year of ash;
for rage to fly me off this ridge.
Foxes scream like teenagers spiked on gin.
A vixen breaks cover, skelters down the hill,
sets the flame of her tail to the bracken.
Bede writes a history of the English people
Ask, why I carve feathers to the spike of knives
when men are too busy to read. I should be bricking
windows into arrow-slots; should be bending
yew to longbows. The year roars with blood,
the murder of faith, and enemies close, closer.
Kings hammer mistrust into swords, demand
battle songs, and the world deafens with terror
of one’s neighbour. I turn to words.
Their little lamps will outlive my flicker,
that of lords, and of this current fear. I grind
gall, vinegar, hone my quill. Feed the dark age with light.
And yet it moves
A comet does not live forever, although it measures its existence
in millions. With each orbit it shrinks, tattered by the journey
along the cinder track of space. A lantern burning its own flesh,
movement kindles destruction. All it can do is swing
around its star, streaming a distress flare; transfiguring
death of the self into incandescent beauty.
Even when too exhausted to glow, it tumbles over itself,
spitting debris. All things that move, live, and by extension, die.
I am burning up. Can’t take my light to greater darkness,
so I spend it now, here. As I devour myself, I shall illuminate
What Girls Do in the Dark Page 3