Monday 30 July 2012

Poems for the Queen



POEMS BY:


Hilda Sheehan

Anna-May Laugher
Heather O'Neill
Susan Utting
Wendy Klein
Michael Scott
Katherine T Owen
Rosie Jackson
Nikki Kenna
Josephine Corcoran
Bethany Pope


'The door was an absurd thing... yet it was passable ... it was this shape'  Mina Loy


THE QUEEN OF EUROPE BECOMES WHOLE

Of plastic she's pleasure:
blond hair, blue eyes,
a squeaky cliché that lies
back and thinks of Europe.

The distance of her faraway 
stare means nothing,
to him, she’s mind-blowingly real,
inflates to double-boob FF

impossible sizes. No deflated look
in full submission, comes without
instructions, ‘no’ never leaks
from any of her holes.

Give her a mouth, she’ll scream,
get dressed, read a book,
walk out, become a woman
of words and mouth

her mighty poems – whispering
from her eye

stood up.


Hilda Sheehan



Dear Inflatable,


Your buyer finds the factory set 'yes' 
in the print of your relentless gaze attractive.
Shy man, he can squeeze your hands
watch your wrists engorge as your fingers yield
and fold to flippers useless for caress.
You'll be the cure and cause of all his loneliness.
No contract will exist between your vinyl and his skin;
except the sweat and stick of desperate co-mingling.
He'll stroke your dimpling breasts,
watch helplessly as they invert,
run out of puff (his staling breath).
Inflatable, I offer you this square of  wordy lace,
a negligee of verbs and such;
so you can wear the words and be made flesh.

Anna-May Laugher

MY SOW'S EAR

I am making the best-looking sow's ear
you've ever seen. It'll have sequins
and sparkles and gold and shit. But no silk.
I'm gonna take it out on trips to see art
and museums and jaaazzzzzzzz.
We'll debate philosphically on
religion and the topics of the day.
People may ask "What. Is that?!" I'll reply
(with pride) "That? It's a SOW'S EAR, my friends."
I'll proclaim but not limit or restrain - 
it can be intangible if it wants.
So fuck you. And I know it's a sow's ear,
but it's mine. And at least I took the time
to acknowledge it.

Heather O'Neill


TWO MOUTHS


  i         Beckett's Not I on a screen:
tongue, spittle, gaps, the lot, in close-up
grainy black and white, remembered red.

 ii         Below her eyes behind their heart-shaped shades
Lolita's on a poster,
sucking an everlasting sweetmeat on a stick.

Susan Utting


HALLUX VALGUS

Not the mark of Cain, nor the print of heredity;
more sculpted by poor fit or fashion: thick socks,

tight shoes and time; so you find a way to live with it.
You remember your grandmother’s -- the excuse

it gave her not to walk -- better to summon him
from behind his paper, lips hypertensive blue.

He’d get out the old Pontiac, pull it in close
as possible to the front step,

sit hunched under his hat, his eyes turned
to watch her mincing up the path.

You don’t think of yourself as a person who has one,
though you know it’s growing in secret:

the cause, iatrogenic – a bad mend from a complicated
fracture. You try to think of it as a badge of honour,

your once pretty feet irretrievably ugly when bare;
your excuse to shun fashion, give in to the comfort

it demands. Nonetheless you examine your daughters’ feet
for telltale bumps, though you always made sure

their shoes fitted – their unblemished feet,
one visible sign of good mothering.


Wendy Klein


ANCESTRAL DESIGN
for my grandfather

His life was mapped on the tip of his nose;
its shape the onion of Russian peasant,
the shade and texture of matzo ball, a globe
veined with history. The blue Dnieper
of his Diaspora crossed it, past Smolensk
on its crenulated path towards Kiev; was cut
in half by the Hudson’s red sweep in its flow
straight and wide from Manhattan towards  
Schenectady. The caverns of his nostrils lurked
below; high-arched, flared. We are Russia and
New York entwined in this one ancestral organ,
evolved through the chance of Cossack raids
on the children of Zion, designed, above all,
to sniff out trouble.

Wendy Klein

Michael Scott


























Two Poems by Katherine T Owen

This woman carries her breasts
with such pride:
large and firm,
they announce her arrival.


An impressive weapon –
a susceptible man
does not stand
a chance:


They dance
and here he is – hypnotised
into submission.


BOTTOMS



I watch bottoms
walk down the street:


Big bottoms,
Small bottoms;


Bottoms sticking out like trays,
Bottoms hidden carefully away;


Bottoms squeezed into the tightest jeans,
Bottoms rarely thought about,
Bottoms calling to be seen.


I cannot hold men to blame
for watching women’s bottoms;

I now do the same.





TONGUE

I have no bones.
I’m the softest invertebrate,
lying wet on the floor of the cave.

Mostly it’s dark in here, warm and moist,
but light can suddenly implode,
flood over me.

I work hard.
I wriggle and push and curl
against these stalactites in front of me.

I make sounds, love, music.
I am muscle attached at the base.
I move like a sheet shaken by the wind.

Too much heat, I erupt into blisters,
too much biting, into lumps and scars.

I’m a creature of the night,
badger or bat,
I understand things that beat in the dark.

Silent I am and yet a thing of speech:
without me words would never reach you.

 Rosie Jackson


A GIRL BODYBOARDS ON PORTHMEOR

Pink into the ocean, you push
flawless as pebble
your hair banded against the wind.

Nothing so new as you
on this beach
except perhaps the mussel-shell

blue-broken by the tide or
the puff of gull down,
white on the sand.

Nikki Kenna


STATIONERY MONITOR

The slap of wet fish
as the books hit the desks
of your tight ship. Each word
battened down. You hate
wasted space. You forget
I wear the key to the treasure chest.
Tonight I will swim free of lines.
Every sentence up late
in its own double cabin.

Josephine Corcoran




THE LITTLE MERMAID

The cleaned up stories
you humans get
are always bastardized

long before Disney
applies its Clorox,
wiping out the stench

every fleck of skin,
or blood,
the fabric has

been washed
a thousand times.
Take, for instance

this story, favourite
of six-year-old
females, splashing

in the bath with
red-haired, plastic
-finned dolls.

Mermaids are not
clean things
though they exist

in water. There
are reasons that
they drowned

their lovers
before bringing
them home.

Your prince, that
tall, dark-haired
prepubescent’s

first crush, fell
overboard, one night
wind-tossed by a billowing

storm. He died
with his eyes open,
observing his loves

bared teeth
and empty eye
sockets, her talons

hooked into
his algae-specked
shirt, the scales

of her tail
peeling off,
revealing a flank


like an ancient
salmon fillet,
thrashing muscular

through the jism
waves. And yes,
there was singing,

enchantment,
a wedding
in a castle

full fathom five
beneath the weight
and press of ocean.

There was a magic
transformation,
something human

into a different,
if not arguably
better form;

but still,
I can remember
those pearls

that were
his eyes
and I think;

who needs
your cleaned-up
stories?

Real life is filthy,
awful, but the
love is more lasting,

undying, rotten
but solid,
inarguably real.

Bethany Pope


SELKIE: THE RIVER'S DAUGHTER

When I was a child, the hair cut
straight across my forehead,
we lived by a river that fed mangroves,
where the herons speared black snakes
and infant alligators, and the city municipalities,
in the cheapest of wisdom, allowed sewer water
to flood into streams feeding the sheepshead
which grew giant and toxic, scales as big
as the nails on your hand.

I was a creature of that river, plunging down
in my cheap dresses, peeling them off
when the water soaked them too heavy to stand.
I swam through the currents, a knife in my teeth,
bonehandled, it came from great-grandfather,
brought home from the wars. I slaughtered
nothing on those swims, save for 
the dragons which rose in my mind. I never took
a lover there on the stream bank, on bed
of palmetto leaves or saw blade, but I found
many real romances on the estuary called
Jacobs island. Where the drunks slept off
their amethyst wine and the wharf rats formed kings,
tied into knots by their fractured tails,
hung from slick branches.

See what I saw. Look though those eyes,
filth blinded slit, the color of sewage,
observe the moment I first loved light.
The sunshine gold in early morning, pouring
through those knife shaped leaves, the glory
of Zeus poured out on Danaë, made pregnant
by light. That numinous glow which rose
from the water, made lovely for once, the colour
of silver, new forged, left to cool on the brace.
I was planted there, drunk on heron wing,
enchanted by fish scale, something took root.
This is the flower.

The roots which grow from watching,
taste of soil fed by rich water, laden with spoil,
and though it was waste, I was not wasted.
Coming home again, here, my feet in the spoilage,
the only locality, unmapped, where all that is beautiful
can possibly grow. What looks foul feels fair
In this light. And those bones you despise
feed the soil where the flowers of the true reality
take root and grow.


Bethany Pope

Jill Carter in her garden with the Queen