It’s late and cold when you arrive at the bar

I read morose verses into the way you hold your shoulders

dancing limericks in your shaking hands.  You’re drinking

tap water because it’s free and studying for hours because

this hungry, twilight academic life is the 

opposite of free.

You will talk to me but your eyes are on an unseen page

if you could fight your way through the clotted vowels

the ruthless complications.  The assertions that you must know this.

If you could only know it.  If you could only know it.  If you could only know enough –

sorry, what were you saying?  You said something.  What was it?

No, it’s okay.

Your shoulders slump a little and you draw a static heartbeat

in the spilled water on the table.  All of a sudden I’m sorry

and I want to put my mouth against your cheek.  And I want to say something.

It’s all that’s in me.  I watch you release all of your breath like it hurts you.

And what I want to say is I love you I love you I love you I love you I love 

Listen, I’m going to buy a bowl of chips

and pretend I’m not hungry enough to finish them by myself.  

Daisy Harris

That Kind of Thing

I don’t work well with

long hair or cigarette smoke;

earl-grey smog in the morning

warmth in my mouth.

I’m not into 

that kind of thing; and by that I mean

anything you don’t like.  Ink under the skin and 

ink in the brain, where it’s not meant to be.  You’re right

I don’t suit the black dress, I should wear the blues

instead of singing them.  

But the thing is, I do think

that something hurts deep inside 

my sea-cave sorrow 

dry 

rimmed in salt.

I said ‘how high?’

and you said ‘how deep?’

Deep South

There are miles I haven’t walked

and parts of the world I don’t understand;

under the boiling yolk of English sun

in the brown-bread humdrum fields

some part of me was made, by name 

by blood by birth only.  

I came back but not all the way;

and I liked it but not all the way;

the slow crawl of the metal trout on the M6

currents pulling among deep-rooted port towns

and through open country running like a deer.

Less songs than there are stories; in the stories

less blood than there is poetry.  But still warm

is the trail back to a time when 

the weather was king and 

everything felt new.  And there were still years

till me.

Dusk

If I ever have a daughter I’ll name her Dusk

and teach her how to swallow heartbreak like vodka so that the buzz outweighs the burn.

I want to give her every smokescreen joy the city has to offer, but I want her to

climb trees; I want to see my little girl dancing in the tungsten-light and I also want 

to hear her mimic the morning birdsong.  

I want her to enjoy her mistakes, but if she doesn’t enjoy coffee

I will let her drink hot chocolate.  

If I ever have a daughter I’ll bring her up with short hair so she knows it’s easier

and I will give her my old band t-shirts so she knows how soft they are to sleep in

so she knows the sounds that made mama.  I will never tell her that old music is better

or that she shouldn’t wear short skirts because it might come back to bite her.

No!  I will teach her to bite instead.

If I ever have a little girl I will tell her to turn the night into ink

but if she prefers paint, or screaming, I will make sure she has

a room with white walls and a soundproof door.

I will make sure she knows that her mother loves her

and how big a word ‘anything’ is, because I will do anything for her

anything.  If I ever have a daughter I will name her Dusk because

it’s the time in the day when all the lights go on.  

Daisy Harris

Monochrome

I want to talk about the fact that I loved you

less than a year ago, and now those feelings are like dandelion seeds on the wind

wishes that turn into weeds, a song I wrote that itches the soul

sunburn on the back of my neck.  I went to the doctor

and had them check that I wasn’t dying because

the colour was leaching out of me like Skittles in a science class

and I couldn’t breathe sometimes at night but I blamed the mould

in the walls and the cigarette smoke in the stairwell rather than let you

take my lungs as well.  I was convinced – sold trapped fossilised – that

you were the only one for me.  I wrote long mournful notes

in the air and on my phone, clawed the clouds from the sky and trapped them

under my pillow, woke up soaked in the rain I found in my dreams. 

The world isn’t a single colour, though, and soon I found

I could see beyond your spellbound indigo to the teals and greys

the hot pink of strawberry soda.  My God

if I could learn half of what I learned from love from something less rife with holes 

I’d never love again.  This morning I found a note I wrote to myself three years ago

that I was writing a love song and 

everything was splendid.

I said to myself, or the me I was then, who didn’t know anything much of anything

I said, ‘Baby, in two years you will fall in love

and it’s gonna suck.’

Daisy Harris

Whistling as a Weapon

When passing the edges of town, where suburbia melted into 

grey endlessness, I whistled at the train tunnels and the railway bridge

the dark gathered like lapping water, my voice bobbing on the surface like a rubber duck.

Alone in the kitchen after dark, for a glass of water

whistling dry-throated into the places where blue and black washed the familiar walls

and outside the window the world was half-asleep.

On a shortcut across scrubby wasteland, the grass arrowed sharply with rats

heavy with moths and the soft tick of crickets, the white earth bone-dust

of dried mud in late summer, and I whistled a pop song that the field wouldn’t know.

Walking home, past the endless echo of doppelgänger houses, wrapped in uncanny shades of midnight.  I was drunk when I started but I wasn’t drunk now.  My lipstick cracked as I whistled

and from someone’s overgrown back garden an invisible something whistled back to me.  

Daisy Harris

Featuring a beautiful picture by the ever-talented Emily Worms. Find more of her work here: https://www.instagram.com/emily.worms/

Fight Or Flight

-Fight – go to Option 1

-Flight – go to Option 2

Option 1

I choose hard.  See if I can get you spitting and swearing

you never knew how big you were, a lumbering bear with five o’clock shadow

in our kitchen.  I push harder, lance the boil, but I don’t love myself

enough to let your ugly words slide.  They stay like ticks in my skin and

weeks later I’ll find them dead and swollen under my clothes

but I remember the pain.

I don’t know why I have to prove that you don’t scare me

like a kid in a storm drain.  All I really want is for you

to choose me again, like you did all those years ago, pick me

I promise I’m good enough.  Real strength, I think, would be 

if I didn’t need you, if you didn’t mess me up for everyone else

when I come downstairs for dinner wearing my mother’s shirt 

and they ask me why I’ve been crying.

Option 2

I choose fast.  I choose fresh air and the fields, rich with the tang of the farm drains

and chiming with little birdsong.  This is me, army of one, but I can’t hold myself

the way another person could.  Every time I run I see myself tough and fleet

like a wizened rabbit, and thick seagrass falling at my feet when the sand slips.

In the clarity of the late spring night my fingers are quietly going numb, followed

by the rest of me.  I force it.  

I don’t need you.

All I need is even ground and a steady heartbeat.  I have a head start.

I’m going to go back to stony silence, a leaden quiet; but it’s temporary, it is.

Under my own roof my quiet is mine, and I choose it, again and again and again.

The only person left to run from will be me

and I’m good at staying ahead.

Breath, breath, pace yourself.  Keep going, indefinitely.

Daisy Harris

A choose-your-own-adventure poem!

Serpentine

She’s a pretty rad girl;

textured like an old silk scarf, splashed in red and dust.

It’s strange to lie on my belly on my bedroom floor and

watch her watching me and wonder what she thinks she is watching.

Weird to see something that has evolved to a single stroke of myth and muscle 

finding her new landscape among dusty wooden boards and towering Swedish bookshelves

the forests of the Carolinas forgotten.

Weird that an apex predator likes Ed Sheeran; she swims in the bass, presses her checkerboard belly

to glass, watches me with odd animal eyes.  

Around my neck she is a cold pressure, easing and pulling to a rhythm like a seasoned rower.

If she comes close enough I can feel her tiny breaths on my skin

hear the squeaking vocalisations that I worried over before reading that 

sometimes they do that when they’re excited.

It’s very strange and cool to think that

my highly-evolved and jewel-toned companion finds me exciting the way I find her exciting.

I’m under no illusion that she needs me;

once a week when I feed her she goes 

wild, and I see the endearing awkwardness of my bumbling friend disappear

behind a loose-jawed smile as she swallows the mouse.  A few days after

and she is back, sweet and weird, and

excited to disappear down my sleeve, where she is not allowed to go.  

Daisy Harris

This is about my pet Carolina corn snake, Rowan

Extinction

I know I’ve been referencing my mother a lot this month

and I know this because people tell me about their mothers like I’ll understand the private language

they spoke; like I’ll know how to bring the feeling of her back from extinction.  It’s not true and

to me every beloved mother looks like mine.

If I don’t write about my mother

if I don’t open a dialogue in my life for everything I feel about her

I will never have a life outside of it.

Do you understand?

As it is I could stand in the garden and drive the birds mad

with my messy human words.  And I won’t, because I have things to do.

Instead I will write poems, because she liked poems; and draw birds, because

she likes birds; and sing folk songs, because I like those, and I am more than

whatever you can see of my mother in me.

Daisy Harris

Black Hole

It was a seaside town

the promenade candy-striped in colour, the long lawns of a Victorian park 

lazy on the downstroke from sky to sea.  Houses were penned in to fill

the wide streets, resting easy on their gardens like old men in deckchairs.  In the houses 

were families 

swelling like bubbles under the fickle sun.  And on the western shore of the town

there was a black hole.  

Everybody in the town knew that the black hole was there

but it was easy to look at something else; the fairground stickiness of the pink blossoms

on the fruit-trees, the sailing boats waving their white flags against the petrol-coloured 

water, the way the street-lamps were elegant like old-fashioned young women

dancing radium girls in the dusk.

You couldn’t ignore it all the time, of course

take the coast-road a little too far, and you could hear it:

an airy thunder, a slow, precarious waltz, heavy on the bass.  

Too far, and you could see it hanging in the sky over the harbour

Vesta’s unblinking iris and the point of no return.

There were mothers who worried for their little ones

growing up too much like daddy.  In high-ceilinged nurseries

they sat singing their accented folk-songs, and asking the black hole

to leave their bairn alone.  When their wee one was grown they

wept to see them in the peaked cap that didn’t sit right yet

too charmed by the stars to see the burning nothing.

Out on the streets of the town the mothers waited, telling stories of

a sunny peace-time

and the dying star called love.  

Daisy Harris

Focus On The Texture

Water moves woolly over her knuckles

the river cold and veined with downy froth

bubbling from where sewage leaks into the current

its toxic body twisted, torn apart by the hard meltwater.  

What the fuck 

happened here?  she asks the startling February morning.  Were there witches 

here?  They said in the town that there were witches.

Maybe witches, she thinks.  Maybe women who were no match 

for February water.

A stiff wind moves the sparse branches overhead

bones and bones and bones, waiting for April.

Underfoot the grass crackles in brittle chorus, cold

and thin against her hands.  

Just don’t lie, said mama.  Just

don’t lie.  Just don’t lie.  Just don’t 

Take a breath, said the witch-pond.

scream and I’ll kill you, he said.  His voice

fluttered with fragile jest.  Under it a ropy violence

lurked, cold eyes like a dead fish.  Scream and I’ll kill you.

Scream

Again and again, said the witch-pond.  Fill your lungs with air.

We could make this go away, said the lawyer.  If you say it didn’t happen.

If you say it didn’t happen.  If you say

No, said the witch-pond.  I heard you.  Do it again.  

She breathes.  Opens her eyes.  The world will see me float, she said.

And they will be scared, said the witch-pond.

In the pond’s surface, she stands up.  Smiles as she steps lightly onto her own reflection

and doesn’t sink.

Daisy Harris