wordsmith and mongrel

Tag: poetry (Page 1 of 7)

[withheld]

I’m not designed for
first times, I’ve got a body built for
growing old, for
affectionate decay,
for building fences and surviving winters

The second time, we were sherbet on a summer tongue,
a sweet fizz of nothing that stayed with me, like
the taste of a grain of rice
in a starving mind

But I’d grown out of carnivals by the third time and you looked like
you might not taste as good
as I remembered.

The fourth time we kissed so hard you couldn’t see
through the fog on your glasses, and by the fifth time I couldn’t see
anything but you

And I walked into the sixth time like I owned it, and I
checked my armour at the door and you said,
my father never liked the killing
, so of course
I didn’t see the knife in your hand until after you had made damn sure

there would be no seventh time.

uneaten

You like to tell yourself,
when it gets dark,
that you’re here because you came down from
the runners
the evaders
the survivors
that your veins rush with the blood of those who managed,
by hard work or
sheer dumb luck
not to end up eaten, and so you,
though your unchewed bones are aching,
must be able to hang on.

But what if.

Maybe your ancestors were the sabre-toothed tigers.
Maybe you are descended not from the fearful but from
the fearsome, maybe your ragged nails
are not those of prey clinging to life, but of a hunter
clawing to its rightful altitude

Maybe,
daughter of tigers,
you are here to do more than survive.

the black hole is a Virgo

It’s funny how easily we believe things,
like when science tells us
there are things we cannot see, or when men tell us
we will be safe with them, or when our hearts say,
even after choking down all that light
all that hope
all that space

maybe there’s something beautiful out there

a trio of fauxkus

Kisses like she writes:
with breathless arrhythmia;
mouthful of music

After the fanfare
come the loaded guns of war.
Don’t get too happy.

Not too much baggage
but it’s all carry-on, and
the cross weighs a ton.

summer body

The week the air turns cold I go back
finally
to the Piscine Jean Taris, to make slow laps and emerge,
light-headed with chlorine and adrenaline,
as Paris is applying her morning blush in the sky.

I had planned to swim my way, in the spring,
into a new summer body,
stripped lean and smooth by morning motion,
regimented into beauty,
but.

Instead in the summer my body grew soft and slow, filled with
heavy cider and light tinto de verano,
with Basque pintxos and oily langos and blue cheese
scooped onto fresh bread beside the Seine

My summer body oozed over the edges of a new bikini while I
cartwheeled down the beach at Le Touquet, and jiggled
under my tutu as I ran a chatty lap of the Château de Versailles, and ached
after I salsa-stepped until 6am

My summer body grew sticky with other people’s sweat as we jostled
before television screens and over beer-stained bars, and then
when the final whistle blew
became a single heaving being of joy and song:
on est champions !

Toasted golden-brown by a gentler sun, my summer body
was coated in Hungarian dust and washed clean to the sounds of thunder
as I danced
fully clothed
like a robot from 1984

Coiled tight with stress, hunched crooked over a desk until 11pm,
then coaxed straight again by practised fingers,
my summer body was slipped back into a bandage dress and heels and taken out
to be admired

My summer body was anointed with the tears of a friend as she trembled
against my shoulder at sunset,
prying open old wounds to let in
salty air
and then racked with my own sobs when in turn she took me by the shoulders
high above the Atlantic on the Camino de Santiago, and yelled
come back
you’re here
they can’t hurt you now
and tried to shake out
20 years of fear

My winter body will swim a little more slowly because it will be
heavy with memories and
fat with lessons learned and it will not apologise
for taking up more space in the world
than it did before.

woman

You believed you were a woman when the
flare went up, spiking shards of fire
through your diaphragm and into something you thought
maybe was your heart? When your eyes fed
your stomach and your mouth,
bereft,
went dry. Looking had become
an occupation and working woman sounded better than just
working girl.

You played at being woman when the flames
danced down your arms and you found
you could command them to
warm your grasp
and sear your prey

You shied from being woman when you reached
the edges, where the wires bared
possessive teeth, and where you had to
watch for openings:
a gate left unchained;
an angry streak of rust that
crumbled beneath the pressure
of your fingers;
a gap through which to crawl
and come out bleeding

You became a woman when you chose
to turn away, and though your longing
howled in the night, you
struck out for open country in search of
other things you did not know.

afloat

ours was a friendship that floated, a
sailboat we took out on
odd weekends, weather permitting, to
peruse the waves and
chase the sun

we bobbed above the unexplored and turned away from
sharks that roamed beneath us,
pulling up our trailing toes and never
throwing in a line although we knew
we’d make a catch.

I used to worry we were fools for
going out at all, if we never
touched the water; never tried to
find the ocean floor,
why did we go?

but when the storm blew up and cast
the sea aboard, I saw,
sunny afternoon by sunny afternoon, we had been
learning
how to stay afloat.

#metoo

The night you grabbed me in the street
Uber said,
Error. Try again later.

The night you grabbed me in the street
my friend was visiting
from Peru. As I left she clutched my face and told me
she loved me, and she was glad
I existed

The night you grabbed me in the street
there were no taxis.

The night you grabbed me in the street
I had almost not gone out because I was
sleepy, and it was
a long metro ride to find my friends, but they said
please come
so I put on a pretty skirt and some
red lipstick that made me feel
bold
and in the end we had so much fun, I danced
until 4am

The night you grabbed me in the street
I had just got off
the night bus, where I had been thinking about
how Margaret Atwood said men are afraid women
will laugh at them, and women are afraid men will
kill them.

The night you grabbed me in the street
had been so happy

The night you grabbed me in the street
I was hurrying home thinking about
the man who just stared at me for 20 minutes at the bus stop and
the man who had run across traffic to say
mademoiselle, can I stay at your place tonight?

The night you grabbed me in the street
you spoke to me first and when I did not answer
you called me obscenities and when I kept walking
your friend shoved me and when I kept walking still
you ran after me and grabbed my arse

The night you grabbed me in the street
was only the second time it’s happened to me. That’s how I told it to my friend,
the next day:
only the second time.

The night you grabbed me in the street
I turned back to look at you in disgust but I did not
break stride, or
tell you off, or
grab you back
because flight seemed the least dangerous option

The night you grabbed me in the street
I felt sick and scared and ashamed
and then grateful
that it was only a shove and a grope
and I wondered how you felt or if you had already
forgotten

The night after you grabbed me in the street I did not
dance,
or jog,
or walk
through the city I have made my home.

good advice I have not taken

we sit vigil for the rainstorms that
dance and die
beyond the railing, leaving us
misted over with the force of their passing. I,
red wine lips and cold feet,
pick the stuffing from your mother’s sofa as we wonder
how manatees breathe, and
what it’s like inside the mind
of Donald Trump.

You drift into my lap and then
into sleep, your breath weaving through the leg hair
I forgot to remove because you showed up
dripping
carrying merlot and a promise of adventure
and I followed you into the night.

I do not close my eyes until after the sun cuts open
purple clouds to bleed light
across the sky and over the planes
of your quiet face.

 

She says,
your skin is tired. Are you getting
enough sleep?

 

The wine lingers, but we give it
no quarter. I am taking you surfing because
you’ve not yet learned how it feels
to stand and fly
at the same time. In the roar of the sea
my mind is quiet, listening only
to the taste of salt
and the slipperiness of your skin in passing.
The brown fades from my hair but it will turn up
tomorrow on my shoulders and strewn
across my nose

 

She says,
now’s the time to start: to prevent wrinkles
you should avoid the sun

 

We lie winded under palm trees and you say
promise me we’ll come back even when
our knees don’t bend but
our backs do
and we’ll eat fish and chips and ice cream
for breakfast
because we can
and I say
promise me
you’ll want to, even when
you’ve forgotten who I am

 

She draws a potion from the pocket
of a tie-waist coat that is just a foot of sleeve
away from a straight-jacket.
Apply this, she says,
it’s anti-ageing.
And I pay her for it because I am no better
at saying no than I am at
taking sound advice.

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