Issue 12: June 2006

Julia Bird | Jane Holland | Gregory Leadbetter | Andrew O'Donnell | Adam O'Riordan | Camellia Stafford

CAMELLIA STAFFORD

Flimsy

I'm thinking of you here, well us,
on a dance floor with bottle glass
underfoot, entwined for show.
Paper cut-outs of boy and girl, so close
to transparency, disco lights
could shine right through us.

But I'm alone in the narrow kitchen,
the lights all off, dreaming
like the little girl who
took to roller skates on carpet
with just one boy she breathed into being.

 

Stille Disco

How do you feel about this?
Each leaf above us shimmying,
a fragile wing of light and gloss,
each an echo of how my fingers sometimes quiver
or how my heart shakes some mornings.

And, how do you see this?
Each dancer wearing headphones,
to dance to music only she or he can hear,
each movement of an arm or leg
seeming with its energy to dispel the silence.

How does it seem to you?
Each painting hung on a wall of the museum,
clamouring for your eyes to give it colour,
each casting you a story, an emotion, none
or patiently waiting for someone's gaze.

How do you feel about anything?
The tallness of the houses here,
the steepness of the stairs,
the women wearing neon underwear in windows
or my hand as it slides into yours.

Or riding through the city
perched on the back of a bicycle,
a piece of toast with chocolate hundreds and thousands on
or me, sitting in the Vondelspark asking:
how can I be any good at love until you are here?

 

Break

Imagine that sheet of ice breaking off
to form the perfect line,
                    the edge of what is left behind.
There a tracery of white starkly writes
in the blackness of the sea,
                    how it survived,
to glare the sun back to the sky.

 

Colour

Flower heads wander the river water's violet surface,
their petals' wetted pinks and reds rocking in the water cot
where the posy landed when it was thrown, uncaught.

The sun flushes a greying bridge, curving across the river,
glazing the ashy tone of its wood with a caramel lustre,
that smiles upside down at the blue, blue cloud-scuffed sky.

Fields surround, bristling their green and yellow needles,
shadowing under the shape of a white plane passing over
the flower-kinked river drowning endlessly in itself.

 

Camellia Stafford lives and works in London. She read English Literature at King's College London and Contemporary British Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art.