What Girls Do in the Dark

by Rosie Garland

  my handful of turns around this little life, spread a glittering trail.

  Since visiting the CERN Large Hadron Collider, you realise what you’ve been doing wrong with your life

  In giant machines beneath the Alps, scientists

  whack subatomic particles together; smash

  protons round a loop of magnets to discover

  something that can only be known by its absence.

  You’ve spent a half-life as an experiment in forced collisions:

  fists, spit, need. Walked into doors you should have slammed

  behind you. Battered your heart in circles, hoping

  next time it would turn out right. You didn’t know

  there were so many pieces a soul could break into,

  how love can be conjured by sheer force of wanting.

  All those shimmery nothings. Smaller and smaller specks of self.

  Atom by atom, you rebuild. Begin to trust what’s there, not

  other people’s shooting stars. The future expands

  the faster you rush after, in a laughing game

  of chase-me. You’ve nothing to prove. Leave

  experiments in destruction to scientists.

  Post mortem

  Permit gentleness; there is worship here.

  You were brought into this world with touch.

  It is also your farewell.

  Their hands make you beautiful.

  They comb out the final tangles of hair;

  mirror the curve of shoulder, elbow, chin;

  ease soap along your limbs,

  gentle as a mother bathes her child.

  Such attention

  to forgotten places of the body:

  the pockets tucked behind the knees,

  the small of the back, the armpits, cave of the ear.

  As rowers push and pull the oar, their arms stiffen.

  Regular and slow, they push and pull the cloth

  in a lullaby of back and forth, writing love

  into the parchment of your skin.

  Let loose your moorings, the struggle to remain.

  A short while, and their hands will not be necessary.

  Till then, they edge you upstream,

  away to where you are not.

  How to keep breathing

  When the world cannot be hurried or controlled,

  there is the pleasure of laying on crisp bedlinen,

  stretching it tight across the mattress, ready to receive.

  The scent of a fresh-opened bag of coffee,

  lemons preserved in salt, onions diced with a steel blade.

  I can’t stop thinking about jars.

  The moment the lid is twisted off,

  the contents begin to die.

  If I had the sense, I’d stand at the counter

  and spoon the whole lot down in one go.

  Fullness answers some questions,

  but not important ones.

  I remember the taste of apricot kernel butter

  bought in a Chinese supermarket thirty years ago,

  and never found again. Like marzipan but better.

  You are an X on the map, and more than that.

  I ask you questions all the time.

  Shoved to the brink of myself,

  you give answers I can lean on.

  Limbo is worse than bad news,

  waiting for calls that don’t come.

  So we open every jar, every bag of coffee,

  stick in our noses and haul breath into the lungs.

  Chop onions to taste brine.

  The bitterness of salted lemons.

  When worlds collide

  Four billion years from now, give or take,

  the galaxy in which we’re border-planted

  will collide with Andromeda.

  She is approaching

  at a quarter of a million miles per hour,

  sweeping across the heavens,

  gathering universe in her wake.

  She spreads spiral arms,

  and we are arranging ourselves as strangers do

  when good manners call for an embrace

  but neither is sure how to hug.

  As we fall towards each other,

  we blink back interstellar grit

  and wait for devastation

  in an off the ten-to-the-power-of-zeros scale.

  But each star will slide polite past star.

  Solar systems will dance by the other

  as water passes through water, rippling not ripping.

  I should like to be there and witness the impossible:

  every planet, asteroid, meteor, scrap of nebula dust,

  the whole crash bang wallop shooting match

  in a head-on collision, incandescent and gentle

  and not so much as a scratch.

  The autobiographies of stars

  run to billions of pages, written in sentences spaced out

  by the aeons it takes light to travel from one to the other.

  Their chapters: loneliness, distance, the coda of supernova.

  Peering upwards, I read texts pricked on indigo:

  convoluted fairy tales of red giant, white dwarf, black hole;

  the Perseids’ flash fiction; nebula sagas of Horsehead, Crab, Orion –

  they can only be read at night, when the world is half

  darkness. I have to trust they’re still out there

  when daylight vanishes them in dazzle, and keep going,

  keep putting one word after the other. Consider

  the wink of my life: a tremble of gold leaf

  clinging to vellum with the breath of the illuminator.

  Bowing out

  When she’s exhausted all the places she can push food

  around her plate, she shoves back her chair,

  – thick rug snagging its feet –

  wads napkin to mouth, unwipes her smile,

  and takes the first step backwards. Leaves the room.

  At the front door, she grabs the rope of her hair,

  sweeps it above her head, combs it over nose and mouth.

  Climbs the wrong way into her coat. Adjusts her arms

  to swivel in their sockets; buttons it back to front,

  fingers clever at working out of sight. She unweds the gold ring

  on her left hand; dismantles wristwatch,

  stops its ticking nudge.

  Scrubs mud onto the soles of her shoes and quits the house.

  Walking in reverse, she can’t see what’s coming.

  Knows if she can, she’ll bottle out.

  Her heels are discovering the way. On and on, further and further,

  she leaves street, city, island, continental landmass.

  Unlocks gravity’s shackle,

  parts sky with shoulder blades and flees the planet.

  The Earth shrinks to a speck she can eclipse with a fingertip.

  She unlocks the pearl keys of her vertebrae,

  Shrugs off a deadweight of flesh. Shakes off breath’s hard labour.

  Keeps going, till there’s no south or north, up or down.

  Planets unknot their orbits; the solar system undoes itself.

  Here, where the universe is still breathing out,

  she scatters into particles. Free of tracks facing in one direction:

  one exit, one entrance, one way through and out.

  Notes

  ‘Making Thunder Roar’. Commissioned by the Brontë Parsonage Museum for Emily200, celebrating the 200th Anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth.

  ‘Palimpsest’. I’m adopted, and was 30 before I got my original birth certificate. It gives my birth name as Johanna Blight. If a couple were unmarried (as was the case with my birth parents), the father’s name could only be included if he was present to sign the register.

  ‘Eloping with a comet’. “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” final lines of Cody (Jimmy Cagney), White Heat, 1949. “There are no battleships off the shoulder of Orion. No / C-Beam
s glittering off the Tannhäuser Gate.” Inspired by the final lines of the replicant Batty (Rutger Hauer), Blade Runner, 1982.

  ‘The correct hanging of game birds’. Latin terms refer to avian anatomy. Rostrum = beak, Syrinx = voicebox, etc.

  ‘Personal aphelion’. Aphelion is the point in a comet’s orbit where it is furthest from its star. Perihelion is the closest point.

  ‘Perihelion is the closest a comet gets to the fire before managing to escape’. The most recent perihelion of Halley’s comet was April 1986. It was the least impressive viewing from Earth for millennia. Halley’s next flyby will be in July 2061. Sadly, that is also forecast to be a damp squib for Earth-based viewers.

  Auto-da-fé. Auto-da-fé was the burning of a heretic by the Spanish Inquisition.

  ‘And yet it moves’. ‘Et pur si muove’. Words of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), after being forced to recant (as in, ‘recant or die’) his discovery that the Earth moves around the sun, rather than the other way around.

  Acknowledgements

  Some of these poems have previously been published in:

  Butcher’s Dog, Confingo, Consilience, Dear Damsels, Extra Teeth, Freak Circus, Great Weather for Media, Loss Lit, New Welsh Reader, The North, Picaroon, Poem of the North, The Rialto, Riggwelter, Spelk, and X-RAY Literary magazine.

  ‘Dark Matter’ appears courtesy of Flapjack Press.

  Poems have also won or been placed in the following competitions:

  Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Casket of Fictional Delights, Hastings Writers Room 5/29, Hippocrates Poetry in Medicine Prize, Mslexia, Reflex & the Wigleaf Top 50. ‘The topiary garden’ was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2018, and ‘Extinction events’ for The Forward Prize for Single Poem, 2018.

  I am grateful to the Hawthornden Literary Retreat, where some of these poems were born.

  About the author and this book

  About the Author:

  Novelist, poet and singer with post-punk band The March Violets, Rosie Garland has a passion for language nurtured by public libraries. Her work has appeared in Under the Radar, The North, Spelk, Rialto, Butcher’s Dog, Ellipsis, New Welsh Reader, Mslexia & elsewhere. Debut novel, The Palace of Curiosities, was nominated for both The Desmond Elliott and Polari First Book Prize and Vixen was a Green Carnation Prize nominee. Latest novel The Night Brother is described by The Times as “a delight: playful and exuberant… with shades of Angela Carter.” She is inaugural writer in residence at The John Rylands Library in Manchester, and in 2019 she was selected by Val McDermid as one of the 10 most compelling LGBTQI+ writers working in the UK.