by shaking our clothed bodies together
like Torvill and Dean in the Bolero.
‘Darling Kisses’ was our name for this –
you had to whisper ‘ooh darling!’ first.
We weren’t close. We were on top of each other.
The massages began at Gran’s house
with Mum-style tickling of the neck. Next came
animals traced down spines and my hand, just shy
of your forest – it was all teeth
and Disney wolves. I think of the forest
in Cardross with the ruined high-rise seminary
that in my childhood was a closed order. Today
its rooflessness is crowned by birds. Its altar
is an altar to needles and fallen angels and weather.
ANNA WOODFORD
White Asparagus
Who speaks of the strong currents
streaming through the legs, the breasts
of a pregnant woman
in her fourth month?
She’s young, this is her first time,
she’s slim and the nausea has gone.
Her belly’s just starting to get rounder
her breasts itch all day,
and she’s surprised that what she wants
is him
inside her again.
Oh come like a horse, she wants to say,
move like a dog, a wolf,
become a suckling lion-cub –
Come here, and here, and here –
but swim fast and don’t stop.
Who speaks of the green coconut uterus
the muscles sliding, a deeper undertow
and the green coconut milk that seals
her well, yet flows so she is wet
from his softest touch?
Who understands the logic
behind this desire?
Who speaks of the rushing tide
that awakens
her slowly increasing blood – ?
And the hunger
raw obsessions beginning
with the shape of asparagus:
sun-deprived white and purple-shadow-veined,
she buys three kilos
of the fat ones, thicker than anyone’s fingers,
she strokes the silky heads,
some are so jauntily capped…
even the smell pulls her in –
SUJATA BHATT
genderality
1978
aged thirteen / i wear a denim waistcoat /
khaki small-collared shirt
knotted with a black silk tie /
my mum refuses to leave the house /
with me until i take the tie off /
i stuff it in my pocket and wear /
an imaginary knot; centre-stage
scene one:
throw me a life
buoy sailor, we living
in sink or swim times;
all mouth and no trousers
getting thrown out the ladies
for looking so sexy butch
she’s a girl!
she’s a boi with a toy
denied admission to Vanilla
she’s a girl
looking straight / through me
she’s all fired up on T
did i say she?
i mean he, it,
shit, we’re crossing over, under / cover
agents for the gender divide
becoming them and finding:
recipes for bombs
measurements for inside leg
how to grow the hair / elsewhere
he’s a faery boi / should be a girl,
grew his hair and tucked his cock down
her inside leg
what a drag, not popular like the queens / not cultured
like the queers, something in-between the word-play
translator or impersonator
transgressor or impresser
test the line
scene two:
skirts don’t suit me, something about the cut,
the print, the way it hangs like abandoned washing
grazing my knees, bellowing in the breeze
an embarrassment / like the time I walked down
market street with the back of it all tucked up in my knickers
and I never knew / that I could wear genes
charity-shop retro, inherited from the underground
worn lives / gender uniforms on rails /
try them on for size / unwanted garments / on special offer /
shop-soiled
y change what you wear / to fit in with your x’s crowd
you still won’t gain entry / they’ll be wearing top man /
when you’re all tammy girl
scene three:
on the street I wear one of my off-stage identities
and an old lady says: ‘can you help me cross the road young man’
i readjust my sock / take my hands outta my pockets,
grasp her arm, dodge the 6pm traffic
scene four:
i can rip-saw / use a lathe, make mortice, tenon and dovetail joints
‘tie your hair back’ the journeyman says / health and safety
i plane oak, wafer thin curls peeling back to smooth contours, trace
the years with my index finger /
28 and still no sign of an identity; carpenter, film-maker, web-designer
activist, mentor, chairperson
gendered jobs / apply within
scene five:
write an application / person specification:
silver wisdom in her hair
roses / spirals / Celtic knots
big / bouncy / / bra-less / breasts /
stunt cunt flying open
four armed lesbian kali gender killer
this flavour is not available in other stores
MAYA CHOWDHRY
Vintage
Saturday’s dress was someone else’s, boned
so that it might have stood up on its own.
I wished I could have known its previous owner;
not just a London wife who had outgrown
the kind of life that needs a scarlet dress,
but a starlet, rubbing ice cubes on her breasts
to keep them pert. She’d sleep cocooned in corsets,
she’d be the broad who walked into his office
that drink-fogged Monday, something on her mind,
fur-lapped, with trembling lips, or a barefoot bride
skipping town, thumbing trucks down on neon strips.
Praying, I tugged the zip and slipped inside
another woman’s skin, as if her sweat
had stiffened the seams like a salt-rimmed glass.
Oh, I was tits and hourglass hips and ass,
a viciously nipped waist, its hold as delicious
as a lover’s embrace.
Of course, it kept its shape
later, when I stepped out of it. The rude
shock of nipples and dark cloud of hair
(no underwear) – I walked, like treading water
warily to bed, my skin’s pale lustre
somehow more flawed, nude as a shucked oyster.
SOPHIA BLACKWELL
A Fallow Blooming
She gasps awake from dreams
of wildfires and deserts
to find the sheet scorched in her shape.
Hazy with heat, she staggers
towards a cool shower, closes dry eyes
and sighs as water spits and sizzles off her skin.
Drinking through pores she stands
through days and nights.
Steam clouds into mist, billows from
the window, spirals to suck in air
heavy with spore and seed.
Still, she drips and steams as lichen
grows on eyelids. Tendrils of creamy roots
twist between her toes and cluster under
sagging bre
asts. Creepers drape shoulders,
caress down her legs, insinuate
over floor and under doors.
New leaves unfurl, shine
with moisture; drip on buds
that swell, bloom and burst
to pollinate the laden air.
Hummingbirds blur to weave nests
from hair, jewel-bright frogs nestle
on mossy thighs and next-door’s errant macaw
preens on her shoulder, indifferent to posters
on telegraph poles and trees.
ANGELA FRANCE
Antidote to the Fear of Death
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Till they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometimes it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
REBECCA ELSON
Peach Season
(for Bob)
If the dirt of my body came
straight from the Okanagan Valley
the fat of them would taste of peaches.
Nipples, taut and high as baby birds
stretching out for food, choke
on the excitement of new life and you
touching me for the first time:
the bees of your fingers and thumbs
buzz little circles into my flesh, find something
that feels like a marble rolling under the skin
and I remember
the mammogram, how it turned them both
to fruit leather – flattened, so that the breastedness of them
spread out until they were nothing – and I remember
how it felt. I remember.
I break the silence to tell you
they’re fine, I’m fine
but the sting of intimacy
leaves a mark on everything it touches:
I know you know what cancer feels like.
The best peach I ever had came all the way
from British Columbia: a yolkful of fruitedness,
a line creasing down the skin of it,
making cleavage – it was the closest thing
to having something holy in my mouth
and I swear it glowed going down my throat.
It was March when you sent that text
to tell me I miss your boobs, and even though
peach season was long gone
I went to Penney’s, found a t-shirt with two shells
on the front – one for right there and there, where
the nest of my breasts rests, where the sting
of intimacy left its mark – and I thought
I’ll wear it the next time, help you find them again:
two birds cupped in your hands
bring back the taste of peach to your mouth.
DIMITRA XIDOUS
Picnic
It’s a cone biopsy. Or a picnic in the sky.
The women lie around with their legs in the air
and the doctor and nurses drift in on clouds.
The women lie back and lie back – they
hadn’t realised how far back they could go.
But still the scalpel hops towards them.
Hops and flies of its own accord,
quicker, knowing exactly where it’s going.
The women float away from the paper cloth
the clean white picnic plates. The scalpel
has a tiny beak to peck at the women
who hide at the back of the sky
where the weather comes from.
The uncertain weather.
MONIZA ALVI
Falling down, falling down
If I ate no cake,
if I ate two cakes,
if I lingered by biscuits,
disdained cauliflower,
if I had not turned
my face to the sun
if the man had not rushed
from the petrol station
dodging before me,
like you, a dancer,
if I had glanced down –
Is that my blood?
Are those my glasses?
That tooth will cost –
Thank you. Oh no!
Not an ambulance.
And don’t call my husband.
I am used to this.
I have fallen off horses.
New raw, rich blood
drops warmly through tissue.
I will call A & E,
I promise. I lie.
‘You’ve done it this time,’
says the bathroom mirror.
My lip is two rags.
With the stained flannel clasped,
I set the cool yogurt,
the crisp and cruel celery
safe on their shelves.
Then I call upstairs.
If I shut my eyes
in Gloucestershire Royal
at one a.m.
I can tick them off,
the London trip,
the din of the party,
falling, falling. Here instead
is a girl, in a wheelchair,
slightly less battered
than my changed face.
Her escort swears,
black-eyed, black-coated,
at stern Reception:
‘They want me sectioned.’
They may be right.
Falling, falling
at Gloucestershire Royal
a fair-faced girl
pulls the threads tight,
white skin, rose flesh,
like plaits on a pony,
my black blood clotted,
thick as the night.
‘How many stitches?’
‘Ten,’ she shimmers.
Put back the cake.
Walk out, upright.
ALISON BRACKENBURY
The Room of Coughing
Sometimes you think someone’s next to you, coughing aloud
so that you spin round, reaching to touch them – too late.
Yet the coughs are like the murmurs of a restless crowd
as though you were in a dormitory or hospital at night,
where inmates dream on narrow beds, twisting, sighing.
If you strain to hear, after a while you can tell the coughs apart,
know which belong to newly-borns, which to people dying
as though you’d seen their colours, milky, yellow, rust;
each cough carries something else, a bird’s shriek, someone saying
do widzenia, a grain of pepper, coil of smoke, the dust
of a city’s rubble. How did you ever think all coughs were the same
when each one catches on a different note, some gruff with thirst
others wet like salt spray. Rancid perfume – Givenchy, Guerlain –
fibres of wool or glass, mould on wallpaper, clinging like tar
or spores of fungus and leaf along every string of phlegm;
in each black bubble, mixed with feathers, gristle, fur
and sticking to every drop of mucus, every childhood blood spot,
pine resin, petrol – you feel it all then gasping for air
you hear your own cough rattling in your throat and inside
it
your mother’s – a bitter taste, cigarettes she finally gave up,
alcohol fumes, scent of roses, a heavy snow cloud and inside that
her mother’s raucous wheezing, a floor creaking, something trapped,
footsteps in passages, a tickle of down, scraping of a knife,
more smoke between the gaps, buckets clanking, the water’s slop;
cut of a whip across her face, kick of a child against the lining, ice
breaking, horses’ screams, refrains which bring you back
to that first splutter in the dark, the forced exhalation of a life
and always like a forest fire her crackling asthmatic hack.
MARIA JASTRZEBSKA
Dress
You would not have worn it in the kitchen
where the air was stifling, where between
times you sat for hours at the big table
poised in a wrap-around apron. I never
saw you in it working the kitchen garden.
It was not the place, your legs dusted
in dried dirt, where you tended runner beans,
raspberries, young greens and potatoes.
Nor would you have worn it on the high street
where you gossiped in a knotted head-scarf,
a plain basket threaded on one arm.
It was on special days, family days, holidays
in high summer you filled it with flesh.
A creamy fabric dashed with maroon
and lemon flowers swished as you turned, laughing.
Colours you loved. An abundance of buds.
MARY MATUSZ
Poem at Sixty
Hallelujah for 50ft Women Page 9