Chasseresse
Rarity, porphyria and is the blood eagle real.
Satin, petri and petty, cash me out. Statins ferment
intermittently, currying kingly demons.
A bitch called quarantine.
Querelles des femmes,
Enter Hippocrates and Galen,
feigning fortitude in worthy-making hypocrisies
non-entities with wombs tender resignations—
always negotiate. There was no purple pigment.
There are always skaldic forums,
scathing the mud from the bone,
teasing cartilage across mucus membranes
like osmosis in reverse.
He said the blood went to my brain
and of course it was madness
to leave the house.
I left him then, paring hang nails
with a hunter’s knife,
collapsed the butcher’s block
unstopped by moonlight
and various capricious tides—
locked myself in an operating theatre
holding fort like a man: mad, madam,
pitching my tools just right.
§
These are not our stories
Who will give you a character—
in this labyrinth of silia;
the left ventricle of the heart
with its apex cavity filled
with two bodies as the river
gives up its dead.
Dura Mater and pia mater,
coagulum in the senate.
Criminal conversation
became congress and took itself
to be seen to. Took place by force
of sheer will.
The echoes from the clubs
would have it she was
taken up tenderly and swift
to be hurled from the nearest bridge.
There’s a shorthand for that:
sartorial vice has metonymic limits
cocked into a featured cap
and starving.
Who will give you a name
for your maiden form?
Is your child heathy and
is it a child of colour?
A cutter and a ketch
burial at Earl’s Court.
See the sagittal section
through to the maxilla
eaten by fish, souterrain
holistically healed
by femoral aortic aneurysms,
this anatomical crucifixion
feeds a fiction, the skin
of Marsus and St Bart’s.
This hand work is hard work
to dispense with; thou art sequestra,
articulate bone distractor—
stitches false as idols.
The catlin moves with ease
through the floors and seas,
finds Calvaria proximal and distal,
hunting its ground
like a pistol. Who made you thus?
Remember well
what the room looks like,
welt-full of wit and smoulder:
harmony, ice age resistance—
though these are not our stories to tell.
§
Vanilla for the dark side
Then the kneeling
then the set down,
action for refraction
made vulnerable on cue
what the abject hell
did he tell you?
That it was me
on the exit wound
fetishising the root canal,
cut throat minimalist
hammock in its masculine
mismatch for threepenny
fingers. Hastily run on
sentence like the much
underrated album.
What if it’s transparent
and nothing gets over.
What if we thank each other’s
mothers and antiseptic resistance
as a means of not really cutting
it. Only knowing the motion
put is not the motion set
onto, that touch is equal
to the mission broached
among those sitting
at the table,
that the triangular nonsense
fundamental to design
only works in handcuffs,
that superior knowledge
eats the fruit of the tree
most divided and knows
all the best firecrackers,
the most easily not set upon;
eats them ceremoniously
for breakfast.
§
“Chasseresse” and “These are not our stories” are from Trammel (Penned in the Margins, 2016).