Sonnet for a Real Slag
One day, she’s gonna be obese, that slag.
Salt and vinegar McCoy’s for breakfast —
pulls at your bedsheets like she’s hoisting masts;
tugging pleasures, snatching at this ragbag
assortment of whatever she can blag.
Telling you half-truths no matter what you ask.
Exposing cream cake thighs, she walks past
your office window. You joke, call her a hag . . .
It’s her youth what you want of her, really,
in that desperate, total way that you do.
And it’s her fault, feelings you’re frightened of . . .
Strength of a mother, her anger nearly
bursts through the lust.
Maybe you’re ready to
fill up her, whole, with the shape of your love.
Classy Birds
Our screen name was ClassyBirds
and we roosted in chatrooms.
Crude wit flying out our fingertips:
sleek and shocking —
rude, like a plume of blue-tipped feathers.
Blowjobs/wankstain/illsitonyourface.
High on the power of the giggle.
Teehee! Quod we.
We soared on the winds of our swelling sexiness.
The thick screen was a thick armour.
We perched on an office chair my dad had nicked from work;
told old men about our dirty knickers.
They kissed our virtual arses,
while our real bums — warm and pressed together —
shared the heat of an intense intimacy.
Fledgling flights for later,
our real wings shorn,
in nests we made with men false as cuckoo’s eggs.
Thin screens now, in our pockets,
like terrible flat runes we carry always.
Unanswered text messages vibrate;
our flesh, hungover soft, ripples rejection.
Worms hang from our beaks,
limp and wet —
heavy with the weight of wanting.
Eating In
Today, I read a poem about eating peaches after sex. The poet luxuriated in sticky sweetness; warm, fragrant juices, on her mouth and the sheets. I’ve never eaten peaches after sex, but once I sat naked at the foot of my boyfriend’s bed, still fizzy from orgasm, and ate cold leftover curry with a spoon, straight from the takeaway tin. The container sent its metallic hum across my teeth. I upended the last of the yellow sauce into my throat as my boyfriend looked on, his face a grimace of horror and arousal. I licked my oily, spiced fingers and stepped into dirty knickers, laughing and sated.
Subchorionic Hematoma
There, inside my steep walled womb,
an egg of blood.
The nurse moved the wand with precise turns.
I had lost dark clots, and concrete-coloured strings of meat —
held them in a wad of tissue and tried to identify human parts:
an arm the length of a fingernail;
some dot of foot.
My boyfriend clasped my hand — he was already crying.
The nurse rotated the wand inside me and said:
There’s your baby.
She was no baby — she was a pulsing pearl,
wedged into a far nook of me.
And as the egg bled its bleed,
she pulsed her pearly pulse
and became my daughter.
After Swimming
We stand by the river eating chips; wet hair whips our faces.
Knickerless.
In the wind, under the plastic flume —
twisting tubes of yellow/green where just now we whizzed
outside ourselves.
Salt burns paper cuts on our water-wrinkled fingers.
Vinegar and chlorine on our tongues and the air.
Cars speed by, flashing headlights in the glow of street-lamps;
orange on orange.
We suck vinegar off our fingers.
Suck the ends of our chlorinated hair that just now underwater
floated around us like soaking clouds while the hands of all these
boys ran over our wet bodies.
Up our legs.
Their lips our lips/For once I am not only watching.
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