As if they were three frail boats, opening their feathers like ragged sails. -DH Lawrence Each day I walk through a forest with somebody’s name carved on a tree. In the winter, I had seen peacocks and hens, and like the old story, birds flew before me: feathers wet with snow. Each of us alone unafraid were trespassing through cemetery trees. Tomorrow it would be someone else walking and […]
Drinks Bitter at the Black Bull Everyone loves a good story, so here’s mine. You’ll say I am barking but not so moony I don’t know what I am. Their litanies could make another poem altogether. She repeated, more than once, I was the smartest man she’d known, and then she turned cold. No, not in death, she wouldn’t look me in the eyes, she sent me home. How could […]
I should have known by the chirping toads, that my past was catching up with me, that Daddy was holding court, that my wit would let me have lands, filled with dragonflies mating: jewel upon jewel, tourmaline wings. Eyes, flashing fire and icicle tears drip off a broken roof. Consider, the cat, shanghaiing a speckled toad. I half-expected it to become a footman, in her soft grip of […]
After Reading Ted Hughes A Devon autumn chases ghosts down alleys, Shura should have been our lost baby, the one flowering from the toilet the day you crumpled your face, pasty- white like the old hive, resurrected with blue-heart eyes. I was Prospero. I was Caliban. I was the filthy-nailed stand in for Daddy. Already, my tongue bled lies, my ****— thick with honey, my vows of wild-escape. […]
Daddy, you emptied oxygen into one of her honeycombs. I was perfect, an amber bead on your tongue when you kissed mummy, filled her bones with bees. The dead are lonely. I walk to the river and sing to you, move the planchette among smooth stones and reeds. The terrible smell of sweat and sweet gas, her hand on my mouth. If I am a good girl, I will get […]
I kept thinking I was Jane Eyre’s daughter. I suspected my mother really wanted a son. Fascinated with attics I foraged through chests with breakable locks filled with baptism gowns, sniffed among moth-balls for matchboxes from exotic pool halls, hints of adoption papers. I kept thinking I was Jane Eyre’s daughter, trying to find myself in the travel section of the library searching for a honeymoon in Katmandu. St John […]
Melancholy Hyperbole 