from the horse as easily
as the farmer tosses sacks
of fuel into a tractor’s turf-box – the same
she rode on as a baby
grinning and jammy-fingered –
that she’d soon lie loose-limbed in the grass
insistent sunlight prying at her closed-eye shells
bogland hungry for her bones.
The slow digestion.
As the poet disturbed the young temptress
from her long sleep in the bog
now let me draw myself in your mind
to emerge from a seam of memory
when you’ve all but forgotten.
My fingers are twisted to roots
my darkened face etched with the musings
of peat. My heart
is a clutch of birds – watch them
cascade upwards to scraps
of cloud like bog-cotton, fleeing your step
your notions of excavation.
RÓISÍN KELLY
Meditation
There’s a brown girl in the ring, fa lala la la la
There’s a brown girl in the ring fa la lala lalala…
Let me do a meditation on skin.
Skin.
Let me do a meditation on tongues
Tongues clicking Xhosa, tongue nailed to a gatepost.
Let me do a meditation on eyes.
Eyes calabash brown drowning in the blue from a Dutchman.
Let me do a meditation on hands
Hands smooth over bottom whipped by licks, plantation
kisses, Brixton boys hungry for Caribbean ass.
Let me do a meditation on ears
Ears seduced by Kyrie Eleisons, rock-steady, Jimmy Cliff
Dylan Thomas, djembe beats,
A lover whispering ‘just a little finger in your panties sweetness’.
Let me do a meditation on noses
Noses pulled straight into European beauty
Assailed by patchouli circa 1971 in a Kingston
(upon Thames) dancehall, Led Zep and Yes and ganja shared
In a purple bedsit, Richmond, Surrey.
Let me do a meditation on legs
Show me your motion Baby
Arms limbo limbering up limbo baby
Breasts the bounty and burden babies of.
And that woman undulating down a city street
Walking like she has the world at her feet
Rolling like a ship braced to withstand every goddam wave
Know this and weep, let me do a meditation on feet
Watch the universe opens as she barefoot passes.
MAGGIE HARRIS
Country cousin
My cousin Mabel writes four times a year.
We’ve never met, but our mothers were so close,
when they traded bonnets they were mistaken one for the other.
Mabel fills her letters with devotion to the styles
of the changing seasons: her new wine-coloured silk
(the periwinkle has been turned for second-best),
flounces bound with black velvet, ruffles and puffs and gloves,
fichus of lace. She always asks, with copperplate regret:
but my country cousin, so far from shops and fashions,
what will you wear this season?
I wear God’s own territory, these western plains that he made flat
so he could watch you run and run for days, and never lose sight of you.
I wear my feet bare and frilled with dirt, the way Indians do,
and wish my eyes as black and keen as theirs.
I strain the seams of my calico dress when I shock wheat with the boys;
instead of flirtations, I offer healthy arms and breath.
With my ungloved hands I weave rags into rugs to adorn my floors for the new season,
and I open Mabel’s next letter. She’ll gush about the new styles in bonnets,
making me a gift of her wine-coloured silk
because it’s been supplanted by the new season’s shade –
dresses shining with the humble colour of wheat.
TRACEY S. ROSENBERG
The Liberator
When our feet hurt, we hurt all over
SOCRATES
When Grettie from Grealish Town
soaked and clipped –
you talked.
You’d tell her things
you kept from the priest.
At first there were doubts
about this whippersnapper
who worked in the hat factory.
What would she know
about stubborn old nails?
But the toenail gang knew her unflappable touch.
She would tuck cotton wool soaked in antiseptic
under an untameable bucko and deliver him.
You’d feel nothing more than her coaxing gaze
calling for, more story, more story.
RITA ANN HIGGINS
Leaving My Hands Behind
I have decided that they are partisan
or at least, not to be trusted.
For all the things they’ve touched, helped, held
there are a thousand they’ve broken.
They’re happy to be let go. Perhaps I’ll see them
out and about, wearing sovereign rings,
nails painted with miniature Chinese dragons.
Maybe I’ll get a wave, or the finger.
I’ll begin a new life
where a blink can shut me off,
where I will never touch, only be touched
and I’ll pull my horns in like a snail.
JESSICA TRAYNOR
Cunts and Cocks and Balls
I’m allowed to stay the night with my friend when I get to be fifteen.
We spend the afternoon trying on her five pairs of Levis.
That night we eat avocado and sit round a wooden table
all wearing Levis; me, my friend, her little sister and
her big sister, her mum and her dad. No one says anything
about the Levis, just about how there isn’t enough avocado to go round.
I save my wages from working in the greengrocer’s each Saturday,
hauling steaming beetroot out of a vat and sorting potatoes
and hiding from the Saturday boy who makes me feel
red as a beetroot; then I buy a pair of Levis. My mother finds them
where I’ve hidden them. In our house no one wears jeans
because they are worldly. I’d been changing into them
behind the neighbour’s garage and going to my Saturday job
where the Saturday boy sometimes touches my bottom and says it’s nice
and I wonder how it will feel when he kisses me and what I should do.
My mother has tears in her eyes and says she must tell my father,
and when she does he takes my jeans and pushes them into the Aga,
where he’d burnt The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie the week before.
(At eighteen I leave home, and later, when my mother can bear to speak to me again
I bring my boyfriend home and she buys him a pair of Farah trousers to wear because
she says people can see his cock and balls through his Levis, only she doesn’t actually say
‘cock and balls’ but I know that’s what she means.)
I’m at a family party and I’m wearing my Levis. My niece is getting married
and we’re all here to meet the boy. He flirts with me and I
enjoy it though I’m surprised because I’m fifty and he’s half my age.
I look at the outline of his cock and balls beneath his jeans
through my sunglasses. We all drink and he gets flirty
with everyone and we all love him till he starts telling jokes.
He tells us about a girl whose camel’s foot is so fat it makes
him queasy. And about how he’d like to give my niece a string of pearls.
&
nbsp; Later I ask my husband, what is a camel’s foot? He says
it’s when a lady’s cunt is big, you know, when you can see it.
Like when she’s wearing a tight pair of jeans. If it sticks out.
I feel a sort of sorrow inside me, about my niece, and
about my cunt as well.
SALLY ST CLAIR
Animal (1975)
In that sunny squat, while Stevie Wonder
talks his book on the turntable, she sits
on the sofa found in a skip, holding
a mirror in her hand. The glass circle
shows an animal there. Her stare meets
a lazy, crooked eye, half-closed
in a defiant wink. Her cheeks pink.
But on the bus to work she lets her knees
fall apart, gives leg-room to the creature
she saw framed in shafts of light:
a salty, rough-coat, brindled beast
without a friendly name to call her own.
CAROLINE GILFILLAN
Breaking Fish Necks
The next afternoon we tried anal sex
and as you coaxed my neck with your thumbs
I thought of Wolf’s Creek
and the fish you wouldn’t catch,
plump trout necks you couldn’t bear to break
and take home dead to your mother.
In the warmth I knew my arse
was soft, the downy peach.
But what was beyond drew you in:
a core, sensitive, harsh
like a peachstone –
its coarse ridges, fine strings
caught in grooves
where flesh is torn raggedly away.
Here, at the kernel
of spine, cat’s-cradle of muscle,
you tried to undo me, cupping my hips
with your hands, breaking me patiently.
As we paused, I did loosen
but held together
around this hardness,
in the brace of your arms
till we rolled apart
and I healed slowly over.
You stopped fishing years ago.
You only used the stillness,
the bronze film of water
to will the fish deeper.
You couldn’t watch them
choke on air or feel the snap
of delicate bones
between forefinger and thumb.
Or walk the mile home
swigging a beer
with a wet chill on your hands,
and flashes of silver skin
too easily become
the dead weight of flesh
slung at the bottom
of your pack.
SALLY READ
Rutting
There was nothing simple about it
even then –
an eleven-year-old’s hunger
for the wet perfection
of the Alhambra, the musky torsos
of football stars, ancient Egypt and Jacques Cousteau’s
lurching empires of the sea, bazaars
in Mughal India, the sacred plunge
into a Cadbury’s Five Star bar, Kanchenjanga, kisses bluer
than the Adriatic, honeystain of sunlight
on temple wall, a moon-lathered Parthenon, draught
of northern air in Scottish castles. The child god craving
to pop a universe
into one’s mouth.
It’s back again,
the lust
that is the deepest
I have known,
celebrated by paperback romances
in station bookstalls, by poets in the dungeons
of Toledo, by bards crooning foreverness
and gut-thump on FM radio
in Bombay traffic jams –
an undoing,
an unmaking,
raw
raw –
a monsoonal ferocity
of need.
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM
In Praise of Footbinding
Women are undergoing surgery to create perfect genitalia
BBC NEWS
The night is soft and dark as plums:
how beautiful the blossom in moonlight,
pale as rice grains.
How beautiful the vulvas of young girls
asleep in their narrow rooms.
In the morning there will be marriage-talk.
In the morning the cutting will begin.
This cut is called Opening Lotus Bud –
it will please the husband.
This, Undiscovered Pearl – choose it
also to stir pleasure.
And this. Silken Pavilion, and this, Perfect Peony,
will please greatly,
all the lovers will be delighted
with the sculpted vulvas of their brides
who until this moment had not known how much
the unsteady feet of their great-grandmothers
– tiny, tiny – excited their husbands,
how the husbands were so delighted
that they wept.
LESLEY SAUNDERS
Honour killing
At last I’m taking off this coat,
this black coat of a country
that I swore for years was mine,
that I wore more out of habit
than design.
Born wearing it,
I believed I had no choice.
I’m taking off this veil,
this black veil of a faith
that made me faithless
to myself,
that tied my mouth,
gave my god a devil’s face,
and muffled my own voice.
I’m taking off these silks,
these lacy things
that feed dictator dreams,
the mangalsutra and the rings
rattling in a tin cup of needs
that beggared me.
I’m taking off this skin,
and then the face, the flesh,
the womb.
Let’s see
what I am in here
when I squeeze past
the easy cage of bone.
Let’s see
what I am out here,
making, crafting,
plotting
at my new geography.
IMTIAZ DHARKER
The Dowry
Look at my daughters,
count them if you wish.
Look at their shoulders
taut and cool as grape skin.
The lovely way they sit,
in control of the Plaza;
there is power in stillness.
Look inside their heads,
do you like it in there?
What do you see? You must
be mistaken – look again.
Look at their brooches
set with jewels from the mid-afternoon:
the fly, the ant, the last drop
of dew from the Alderman’s lips.
Look at the gold strung teeth
smiling across their throats.
Have you finished counting?
Well, count them again.
JANET ROGERSON
Five Years of Growth
My mother is aghast. It’s taken five years to grow it,
and I’ve no answer she’ll accept because I just don’t know
whether it was the heat – 105 Fahrenheit in the shade –
or the weight of it that oppressed me, or whether
it was the sound of next-door’s lawn mower grooming
the unruly August grass, or even the rock and roll
of next-door’s boy, whom I fancied, who didn’t fancy me,
his quiffed head turned forever towards my spotty friend Vicky,
and though he taught me to fish one afternoon; evenings
I could see them miming sex with their clothes on
through her kitchen window; or
whether it was university only
a week away, but eight hundred desert miles away
in another state, that made me gather my ponytail, my long,
beautiful ponytail, into a tight rubber band, that led me
to the sewing scissors that were dull and grumbled all the way down
to the stubble, chewing through five years of growth,
or whether it was the unbearable idea of freedom. Snipping to shape,
the dyed-red hairdresser diagnosed typical seventeen,
but I must have guessed that freedom was whistling towards me
like the San Joaquin daylight whizzing towards L.A.
WENDY KLEIN
Darling Kisses
When we snogged, I was Mum’s
trendy yoga friend Trish. You were Kev,
Trish’s imagined fella. It was after Dynasty
when we kissed and ‘did it’
Hallelujah for 50ft Women Page 8