they’d hear me hiss and cackle, whistle back at them.
SUSAN UTTING
Trinity
I
Once there was a woman with a big mouth.
She opened it wide in hunger.
She opened it wide in anger.
She opened it wide in laughter.
Her mouth was so wide that when she was hungry,
she could eat you whole.
Her mouth was so wide that when she was angry,
lightning sparked from her throat.
Her mouth was so wide that when she laughed,
the whole earth shook.
One day when she’d had enough of the world,
she opened her big mouth & swallowed it
& kept it quietly inside her.
II
Once there was a woman who grew hair on her face.
She didn’t grow it to make people snigger behind their hands
& she didn’t grow it to make a point.
When her friends took her aside to talk discreetly about
depilatory creams & electrolysis
she just smiled a smile of serenity & grew her hair a little longer
(soft hair, womanly hair).
She didn’t grow it so people would stare at her in the street
& she didn’t grow it so they’d turn away from her in lifts.
& when small children tugged at their fathers’ hands & said
‘Look Daddy, that lady’s got a beard!’
she just smiled a little smile inside, all to herself
& grew her hair just that much thicker
(lustrous hair, feminine hair).
So that the hair on her face grew & grew
all soft & curly & growing
until it developed into a dense, tangled thicket
& Piwakawaka the fantail came to live in it
& sang sweetly in her ear.
III
Once there was a woman who asked the Great Goddess:
What shall become of me?
And the Immense Goddess spoke to her
in her huge roaring voice saying:
You will have many husbands
& several wives
(not all at once, necessarily)
because I have chosen you
you who are a great lump of onyx among women
to go forth and, well,
not exactly multiply with all these folk,
but at least have a very jolly time of it.
Lay hold of the Tree of Life, said the Enormous Goddess
(oh yea) and sip at the Endless Well.
You go for it, she said.
Go get ’em.
Thus the woman knew she had been sanctified
& that is why she recommends
you just open your heart as wide as it goes
& damn well enjoy yourself.
JANIS FREEGARD
Happiness
My hair is happy
and my skin is happy.
My skin quivers with happiness.
I breathe happiness instead of air,
slowly and deeply,
as a man who avoided a mortal danger.
Tears roll down my face,
I do not know it.
I forget I still have a face.
My skin is singing,
I shiver.
I feel time’s duration
as it felt in the hour of death.
As if my sense of time alone were grasping the world,
as if existence were time only.
Immersed in terrifying
magnificence
I feel every second of happiness, as it arrives,
fills up, bursts into flower
according to its own natural way,
unhurried as a fruit,
astounding as a deity.
Now
I begin to scream.
I am screaming. I leave my body.
I do not know whether I am human anymore,
how could anyone know that, screaming with happiness.
Yet one dies from such screaming,
thus I am dying from happiness.
On my face there are probably no more tears,
my skin probably does not sing by now.
I don’t know whether I still have a skin,
from me to my skin
is too far to know.
Soon I will go.
I do not shiver any longer,
I do not breathe any longer.
I don’t know whether I still have
something to breathe with.
I feel time’s duration,
how perfectly I feel time’s duration.
I sink
I sink into time.
ANNA SWIR
translated by Czesław Miłosz & Leonard Nathan
Could it be
When you leave
I smiling hold
this soft furry
bouncing
tingling
tickling
I don’t know what to call it
‘thing’
it moves round me
all day
moves me round
all day
tickling tingly ‘thing’
waiting to bounce out
my eyes
my mouth
my ears
my nose
my belly
my thighs
and all those other shy soft places
waiting to be named
in subtler tones
waiting to bounce out
soft funny
bouncy cuddly
tingling tickly
ah! so touchy tender ‘thing’
waiting to bounce out at you
when you get home
could it be.
JEAN ‘BINTA’ BREEZE
My Black Triangle
My black triangle
sandwiched between the geography of my thighs
is a bermuda
of tiny atoms
forever seizing
and releasing
the world
My black triangle
is so rich
that it flows over
on to the dry crotch
of the world
My black triangle
is black light
sitting on the threshold of the world
overlooking
all my probabilities
And though
it spares a thought for history
my black triangle
has spread beyond his story
beyond the dry fears of parch-ri-archy
Spreading and growing
trusting and flowing
my black triangle
carries the seal of approval
of my deepest self.
GRACE NICHOLS
Reading My Skin
You read me as if I were braille
your fingertips move over each of my limbs.
On my left thigh you touch sad, on my right
lonely, where your pinky presses down
as if to double-check. I feel you
search for other words.
You stroke the inside of my legs,
find broken, then travel to my belly, pause
at Bolivia and English, confused
and it’s not till they touch perdida
that they begin to understand my unease
while you read me. On my feet’s soles,
where the skin is hard, you find fall, Tarija
near the number four.
At my knees Huntsville, Texas where
you stop for five seconds, tapping on strangers,
religion and home where I try to nudge
your fingers away but still you look
for other codes and find only
scattered question marks.
But you pause longer, almost a minute
at my hip bone, on New York, Joe, John
and
a word even you won’t say aloud
and begin to realise why
I was reluctant to be read.
You stop on my left breast at Edinburgh
and tha gaol agam ort, not wanting
or needing to feel anymore.
KATHERINE LOCKTON
Full-length Mirror
Sally the therapist stops by on Mondays.
Bright and brunette, she accepts, smiling,
the snail and bag of screws Billy gifts her,
then sets them down like the Turin Shroud
and chats to Matron, before going up.
I share with Medusa, so sometimes
I wander in during their sessions,
pretending not to listen. Thought
I was in love when I saw her unpacking.
Shy, huge eyes and a full-on kapow
of a body. But we’re all nuts here.
Sally asks about the zoo, the food,
stays safe to build rapport. Gets grunts.
Medusa pretends to read, her oilslick hair
pooling on the pages of Jane Eyre.
Sally asks if it’s a good book.
Medusa doesn’t look up.
The therapist hefts a full-length mirror
across; asks if they could both glance
into it together.
The second night, I crept into her covers,
murmuring compliments, trying to sneak
a kiss, my tongue like a cobra; a finger.
The doctor, stitching stoicly,
said I was lucky.
I gather what I say I came in for
and turn to go as they both stand up,
shrink and shrinkee, to face the glass.
Medusa shrugs and says she feels
the same as ever –
she wants her head cut off.
Sally nods, Sally sighs a century.
KIRSTEN IRVING
On Nudity
The moon sits in the sky
like that stray cat sits in my window.
The cat stares at me & because I don’t feel
dirty enough I walk outside & knead
my fingers into its flea filled neck.
I see my neighbour naked at her counter,
moonlight tattooed to her nape & I think,
I need to go the gym.
I need to stand naked at my counter
so I can leave the blinds up & be
objectified by my neighbours & the moon.
I usually mind my own business, but smile
when my neighbour turns around slightly
horrified. The stray arches its back
into a soft crescent against my hand,
against the darkness of a siren shrieking
into a hospital’s empty bay.
KATIE CONDON
I Think of You and Think of Skin
I think of you and think of skin –
its soft stretch, ways it may fold, or be pressed,
occasionally tear. How it absorbs the fix it’s in,
ends up not innocent, unkissed, yet simple in its rest –
your father’s work, to expose such by the sun,
harried and tawed and dressed for the intent
of its disguise with musks and roses. For you, years gone,
I’m pale now, peeled, unwritten-on, a reproach unmeant –
white widow in my quilled intransigence, a swan
alone. Days such as these, late summer of my life,
I wonder at this want to turn a yearling’s tongue
to subtleties so hollow, telling tender lies –
those nights you travelled me with words, blood-nibbed
and burning, tell me I was your first, flawed, outlawed script.
PIPPA LITTLE
John Shakespeare, William’s father, was a ‘whyttawer’ (worker in white leather) who made gloves from calf, kid, lamb and rabbit skins so fine they were almost translucent. He might spend up to a year preparing the hides before beginning his work. The sonnet is in Anne Hathaway’s voice. [PL]
No, Mon Amour
My breast
(the right one)
shrinks inside its pouch.
It is pale,
toadhearted.
The lesser breast
suffers the most.
Poor relative
of the breast with the franchise,
specially commissioned theme tune
and gift shop.
How often people presume
that the agony of the breasts
is double!
No, mon amour.
While the left
is crushed and petted,
the orphan right
silently hungers.
The animal slopes
back to its room.
If only the scenario
weren’t so
laughable.
If only the left
didn’t swell
with each hard twist
of the nipple.
AMY MCCAULEY
God Save me from women with Choppy Bobs
Who sashay into the office wearing too much fake-tan
and talk about gastric bands, crow’s feet, cracked heels.
They all eat sushi and talk about their clitoris every seven seconds
and swish their hair like Claudia Schiffer and tweet minor celebs
and wonder what they would do if they ever got stretch marks
and they once made a suicide pact in the conference suite.
Kill me if my breasts ever sag or if I get so fat that men
no longer find me attractive, even my husband they say.
Darling I’m wearing Eau de parfum by Katie Price.
Can you smell the long top notes of dewy lime? they ask
before inviting each other to run their fingers along
the smoothness of their product perfect skin
but these women fall silent
whenever I enter the room
then they eek amongst themselves like mice.
What does it feel like to be youngish and only have one breast? they ask.
I could try to explain it differs from woman to woman.
I could say quite honestly to me it doesn’t matter
that having one breast makes me unique
actually, it makes me feel like an amazon queen.
Save me from these women.
I know the world can’t be full of women with cropped, black hair
who won’t give themselves to the darkness no matter what.
But all the same God save me.
NICOLA DALY
Sexted
It happened at school, in Drama: some girl
sent photos to a guy who sent them to another guy
who got off the hook. Apparently there’s a line
and if you cross it you’re an on-site lifeguard,
the rest of us quietly drowning until we’re saved.
She managed to cry in the right scene, but it wasn’t
about the play. She shook for days. Like his phone
when he got the text, dropped like a bomb
in his pocket. We looked at the floor and the fates
spun in the corridors. She left the stage. Those of us
who’ve been there and lived, we didn’t dare say.
After all, why try to explain what nobody saw:
that somebody somewhere must have looked at her
full-on, too hard too long, set her in freefall.
JASMINE SIMMS
Not Andromeda
I cannot hang damselled in the night sky for you –
lunar, the translucent lilt
of alabaster skin, slender arms,
fingers which taper to vanishing points
and, like hot glass, slowly fold into place,
sitting quietly. I cannot grow legs which
slide, waxen, down your glance
with tiny feet bound
to a pulp and my bones
do not quiver with fear
in egg shell threads, stitched together
in a diminuendo of the waist and a fine needlework
of the voice.
I cannot be Andromeda.
As a mortal I do not require your worship, nor your
offerings at my feet to guarantee you
a rich harvest. The corners of your plinth bruise
my dappling of cellulite, pomegranate
flesh, clay left
with the impressions of
a creator’s thumbs. I possess
a body full and strong, folding like an artery
or a root feasting, sunk in earth – rough, furrowed,
rashed with lichen.
If I am celestial at all, it is because
we were both drawn
from the same flaming blood, a light shed
from the first sighs of the stars.
Let us grasp each other’s shoulders.
Let us share a look of understanding.
Let me be a brother to you, even though
I am not a man.
KATIE BYFORD
The Blossom Queen
Hallelujah for 50ft Women Page 12