Issue 16: May 2010

Judy Brown| Jane Draycott | Wayne Holloway-Smith | Amy Key | John Stammers | Heather Philipson

 

JUDY BROWN

Spontaneous Combustion

Later, I learned that someone might enter
a house where the smell of pork, burned-up,
contradicts the cold. Yes, a smutted corona

marked the ceiling artex. That, while the victims
flame like souls and the walls wear
the brown language of bushfire, it is usual

for the chair to be uncharred. Only an oily smear
remained. That the bodies sear past bone
to air, facing the burst TV; but the shoes,

(records show) are rarely consumed. In them
I found a metatarsal, loose in the rag of the sock.
That it happens in the morning as often as not.

And they are usually alone. Who knows how,
in his slippered quiet, he found the latent heat
to blow, what set his liquids to a rolling boil?

After public disasters, there are always those –
fathers, congenial men – who turn half-ghost,
borrow one of many offered deaths, and run.

But this – a cool life which heats unnoticed,
which some god’s burning-glass has caught.
No. When the fire came, tell me he didn’t feel it.

Metal Fatigue

We lived among the works of the great engineers.
All of them were fucked. The Anderton boatlift
broken for decades. Whole summers fled

down the towpath into the tunnel’s wet nave
where I’d breathe in the dark like a drowner.
Alone in the house, I’d dance for the hell of like

under the obfuscation of a blue bulb.
The stereo hummed with bass like a hive in a strop.
You could hardly hear it over the ring road.

In Deep Purple, too, everything seemed
out-of-focus, murky. The music was thick
and encrusted, like a current stirring in slurry.

That’s where I saw you the first time,
in the photo under the LP’s peeling cellophane.
You walked towards me like a man

leaving his whole life and slightly glad of it.
I have stayed. Each day there is less to hold me.
Just the smear of the wine crawling back down

an emptied glass, the rub of the cassette-head cleaner
turned up loud. This evening I’ll walk
along the canal by the new carpark

which is beautiful at dusk, a grid of lightsticks.

Thirst

The quartzy banks of brand-name water
rose in Wellcome’s chillers, rank on rank.
We wandered Kowloon City gripping bottles
studded with more water from the air,
held them like something designed to teach us
to tolerate a certain therapeutic pain.
Behind my eyes I re-draw streets where he
and I would stop to look in hardware shops,
pick up serving platters in the shape of fish
or be amazed at novelties of a minor kind -
fork-spoon-knife concertina’d in a leather case.

All the names have washed away with later weather.
I’m left without the words for where we went -
the alley where a horned and severed bull’s head
lay cooling in the butcher’s basket, a market
whose stallholder kicked towards my sandals
a tiny snake escaping from the pak and bok.
I dream I walk there, my shoes full of steam.
Sometimes I wake there, my mouth flexed
in the shape of place-names I now don’t know,
and I sit up here and gulp and gulp from plastic
tepid throatfuls of our local water.

Dignity

Four am in a five star hotel.
The atrium drops beside you
like a turquoise mineshaft.

In the toilet you fall in love
with your own boozy sweetness.
Above the pure basins you are

self-smiling at the crystal mirror.
Smoked glass grows around you
like curtains. You’re with friends,

and with your saints: the table
an altar of blonde wines.
The others seem just mouth

and skin. Endless cigarettes.
How clean each new filter tip
looks. To plait yourself into

the night, however it comes.
To be much less than you
should be. In the taxi back, always

the same, hiccups worse than
sobs, your skirt rucked right up.
It feels like an obligation.

The Blackmailer's Wife Reads History and Considers the Nature of Guilt

After the Bourbons returned, people claimed they saw
Napoleon’s face in the moon. Others caught the rigging
of his facial bones, the holes of his eyes, ghosted

on the flattened white of an egg. Myself, I’ve a fear of touching
a white balloon and finding my husband’s head inside, of feeling
through latex, shapes I know – a nose, his forehead. Ears.

Some nights I’m out till dawn on the Astroturf. The birds
never go quiet. Napoleon is still up there, in his white tights,
pulling like a tyrant on the North Sea’s guy-ropes.

I keep out of the kitchen when the caterers come – mozzarella,
lychees, meringues, are ripe landscapes for mapping by generals.
Our dinner guests drink toasts with sweating hands. Afterwards, I bath.

Arabesquing over my shoulder at the mirror, I see the Emperor Hirohito
smiling bluishly through the white skin of my arse. (Later a blank canvas.)
My husband says no: it was only mist passing over the security light.

You think too much, he says, still wanting me to read his palm.
We both know I could do it. Up here, clouds shred over the city.
over the river, like the sails of tall ships, only half-remembered.