Issue 11: November 2005
Lara Frankena | Sandra Greaves | Jen Hadfield | David Hale | Paul Perry | Philip Wilson
LARA FRANKENA
Albatross
It lurks under desks
where files are forgotten
behind empty bottles
and spare shoes,
building nests of tangled wire
and frayed extension cords
between cubicles
and in sub-floors. Its caw
the crackle of an old intercom,
a muffled cough.
It scissors through network cables,
phone lines,
pecks at screensavers
in the dark of night.
Working late,
you hear the clatter of claws
on a keyboard,
the rustle of bin bags
with no janitor in sight.
When the photocopier
rumbles to life
it's not your co-workers
you find pressed up
to the machine
in some after-hours tryst,
but the smudged platen
spotted with some dark liquid,
a few stray feathers stuck
and sheet after sheet
falling to the floor
with your face
on every one of them.
Vipassana Meditation Retreat, 10 Days' Silence
The Supremes keep singing Remove this Doubt
from my Mind in the meditation hall.
It seems to be triggered by the teacher asking us
to reel in the wandering mind, the chattering mind,
the monkey mind leaping from thought to thought.
I think I am the queen of wandering minds.
I am distracted by the juicy concert of my neighbour's belly.
I read the inspirational quotes from tea boxes in the dining hall.
I dream in French and read the labels of every toiletry
and cleaning product in the bathrooms.
The woman in bed number three vanishes.
Bed number two talks in her sleep.
Someone in the next room screams at night,
waking me before four a.m.
The knots of the wood-panelled bathroom
have been encircled by gouging
with some sharp instrument,
revealing alien faces and innumerable eyes.
The woman in bed number four escapes.
Someone has written HELP with broken sticks
on the walking trail next to the woods.
The woman in bed number five
is trying to communicate with me —
I can tell by the way she braids her hair.
Our female teacher disappears.
Outside, a wasp crawls behind my glasses,
lingers on my eyelid.
I sit perfectly still.
It does not sting me.
The Hanged Woman
There is some comfort in the rustling leaves,
less in the creaking bough.
Her skirts are secured discreetly
above the knee with a length of old sheet
and her wrists bound at her back.
She digs her nails into her palms,
sways slightly as her neighbours drift off.
From here she can see into the parson's bedroom,
where things are decidedly untoward,
and beyond, through the windows
of Weaver's Cottage, where Widow Browne
crouches over bundled herbs,
and on to the Morley's henhouse
where young Joseph creeps,
stolen eggs cradled in his waistcoat,
a certain Miss Winslow on his mind.
She would laugh if she wasn't gagged,
if her throat wasn't stretched
like a hen's on a chopping block,
if her feet didn't drag her down,
eager for gravelled paths,
cool flagstones,
the familiar texture of her braided rug.
From here she can see beyond
the empty square, over the fields
to the Hopkins' burning homestead,
a smudge on the horizon,
and the highwaymen whose approach
she is unable,
even if she were willing,
to signal to those who will not meet her eyes.
Lara Frankena has dabbled with video, performance art, sound
for installation
and photography, and occasionally even shows some of her work. Her poetry
has been published in the Reactions 5 anthology, in which
'Vipassana Meditation
Retreat, 10 Days' Silence' originally appeared. 'Albatross' came second in
the
Essex Poetry Festival Competition 2005.
Available from Amazon.co.uk: Reactions 5 (Pen & Inc, 2005).