A selection of my favourite poems I wrote during #Escapril2019.
Day 1
- A Fresh Start
I’m moving south
for a new beginning.
It’s a strange and brutal thing to think about
the girl who grew so tired of her own tangles that she cut them out.
I run south with the river that has carried me all my life
where larch gives way to spruce gives way to English oak
to you who have never felt the chilly prickle of the wind over the hills
or the yank in your stomach as you gulp gin on the filthy beach.
My legs will never stop knowing when to turn left
and my hands will never forget the bite of a fence I should not be climbing over
into fields that muddy my feet and haunt my waking dreams.
My tongue never quite learned to speak Scots
but knows the shapes of their words and songs and people asking where I’m from.
I wonder if it will be a fresh start after all.
If I’ll walk home through English streets to fall into bed beneath a sky that seems closer
and think about how her mouth tasted like sugar and how his searching hands didn’t know how to take no for an answer and how the shipwreck you can see from my gran’s bedroom window looks red when the sun shines on it.
Leaving can rip your heart out, but it will leave the things that inhabit it where they lie.
Day 4
4. Anxiety
What a weighted word.
Weighted like worries and worries and whys and worries
like listening to Daft Punk in the dark
and wanting to die.
Fifteen
fear is your enemy, fifteen.
Sixteen will tell you so
as she swallows beer and bloodied lips with equal enthusiasm.
Eighteen doesn’t know how either of you survived.
There are tiny tummy-wrenching moments –
what if he doesn’t like me what if my dress doesn’t fit right what if I can’t drink like they can
and then there are long, gulping silences that sound like
EVERYONE YOU LOVE IS GOING TO LEAVE.
One drink and I’m dizzy
two and I’m drowned.
It’s all about making it impossible to return
blocking routes to gravesites.
Sixteen is six feet under
fifteen’s somewhere worse.
Eighteen writes things that confuse her
and drinks something stronger than beer when she wants to forget the earth under her fingernails.
Day 10
10. Femininity
When I was small, I loved Land Army posters.
Apple-cheeked girls smoking rationed cigarettes and kissing their soldier boyfriends on odd weekends
cropped curls and high-waisted twill shorts, fragile hands and stalwart grins gracing green hills
Their lips were so red all the time
even when they ploughed the men’s forsaken farms, they were all cherry and charm
tough and sweet like russet-feathered kestrels.
My youth is wilder than wartime;
I run through fields bracketed by electric fences and cloudbust skies scissored by power-lines.
I keep my hair short because it doesn’t feel like mine when it’s long.
Dresses are a rare treat; shorts are rarer still, long grass on my calves and freckles spilling down my skin.
Androgyny is a pill I swallow without thinking about it.
I sing folk songs in my husky voice, my mother says I have an old-fashioned face.
My father says he doesn’t like the way I sit with my legs apart
and that I look prettier without my specs on.
I keep up with the boys by taking words for parts of my own anatomy and making them ugly.
Murdered women in films get paler and prettier each year and each year I see more of them in the papers.
Tough and sweet are things I strive to be, not necessarily in that order.
Knowing how to hit someone so they’ll let you go
isn’t very ladylike, is it?
Wouldn’t you rather have a corpse that looked like a girl a man could mourn?
Day 11
11. Not From Your Perspective
True Confessions of a Stepford Wife:
Well, really! Why do you
spill your hot coffee and your hotter hands
all over my buttercup body?
It’s like nobody ever taught you
that the proper way to bake a man’s heart
is between the third and fourth ribs with a blade of
pure silk! He is just so good to me.
Honeymooning down aisles of canned cream and bloodied chops
I’ve never known any butcher who could hold
a woman like my sweet boy.
We put our feet to the gramophone’s
soft, stuttering cry of a child, mommy, mommy…
You can’t believe everything you read
in the papers or in Plath.
Maiden names and half-remembered misdemeanours mean nothing
when the blood of a white lamb bred one whiter still.
Won’t you take a little Clorox in your coffee?
I cannot stand for my home to be in such a state of
catatonic clumsiness. Cat got your tongue? Cat got your –
Oh, silly me! I must be home to bed.
Day 12
12. Spring Cleaning
Have you cleaned out the bones
in your briar patch?
Under Elysium’s turbulent skies
lie a hundred through-roads to nowhere.
Meltwater carves quicksilver veins through the hillside;
have you heard what the bees are saying this year?
If you lie tangled like wild bramble in the dog-hair grass
the rabbits will run their lucky feet all over you.
Day 16
16. Any Dreams?
Yes.
Oftentimes I dream of my mother. I’m told that this is normal.
One night she came to collect me in her car. I’m assuming that this meant that the woman in my dream
could drive, could gather me in her arms like when I was three and sing me lullabies without stuttering.
I ran to the car, and this is when it struck me
quite hard in the chest
that this was a longing dream.
I couldn’t reach the car for all that I ran and for all that I ached
and eighteen is really quite a fragile age when you’re asleep.
Another night I dreamt that her afflictions infected me
that I was wandering around a surreally-bright supermarket, dying.
I fell at your feet and said, I have this thing in my head that’s going to kill me.
You said, Okay.
Then you broke something. And then we kissed.
What’s a teenage dream without kissing
even if it’s the last thing you do before you die?
Some nights I dream of flight.
I am fluid and natural
pushing off buildings
swimming in the sky
and it feels like something I could do
if only I could find the places in my bones that know how.
I wake thinking I can still do it.
Other nights are odd:
that girl off the TV started a fight with me
but in this dream I was briefly resilient
until you appeared and said
I love you and I said I wish.
Day 21
21. It’s The End of the World
Everything’s quiet
so we play your dad’s CDs until it’s not anymore.
Stinging rock riffs ring out
across an acid-scarred suburbia.
Under the bled-out sunset sky
we dance like the mad things mankind could not destroy.
Strings cut, we take turns riding your skateboard
backwards down one-way streets.
When the protesters said ‘the young will inherit the earth’
this wasn’t what I thought they meant.
Half the streetlights are blown out
but there’s nothing to fear in the dark anymore.
We tangle our hands as we walk back to your house
where music echoes across the empty street.
“Falling in love,” you mouth
but I am too busy loving the fall.
The trees have taken back the sky
smoke fading from the horizon
where toppled buildings lie in shame
rubble and bones, rubble and ruin.
You pull me against your chest
and whisper a name into my hair.
“Eve.”
I burrow against your ribs and wonder which of them formed me.
We drink your parents’ most expensive wine
mixed with energy drink the colour of electricity.
“To being the dinosaurs who wouldn’t die,” you offer.
I toast
to teenage rule and to kissing you silly
in the bomb crater in your back garden.
Day 24
24. Liar, Liar
Big-eyed like the brazen doe
that ventured too close to the gardens at the edges of the woods
the summer I was ten
I stand spindly and spooked
too close to where I do not belong.
Observed; twitching fingers,
hammering heart.
Woodpecker-wild.
Entrapment comes easy to your silken words;
your tree-sap truths and your fluent lies.
Hair between your fingers; her between your teeth.
All the better to bite you with, bite no bark.
When it bears the body of a bird, coercion sings.
Hold me when I am alone; on the forest floor, I’ll let ivy be my wedding-band.
From between the fingers you twisted, flowers grow.
Day 25
25. Pick an Animal
A man walks alone
on my black beach.
The sun holds his stooped and stilted form
in its earthbound arms
that tie me to the ground as surely as they do the sky.
The man is alone, and sad, and
the only thing of his kind for hundreds of miles.
Like I am.
He stops for shells; I stop for storms.
Kinship wears many skins, doesn’t it?
I skate low over the whitecap waves
and he is glad to see my wings cut the water.
I leave the hard-edged laugh of waves against rocks
for an open and endless line of silver on silver.
The broad back of a lone whale rises, silent, under me;
his sparkling breath flies from below and diamond-dusts the air.
He sings the song my bones know better than I
that his father and his father and his father sang
to the coastline’s mocking call of time.
Time! Those of us in the sky know nothing of time.
A hundred years and a hundred of our sharp and shining bodies
pass like the bright flicker of fish under the water’s blue skin.
In the sky, it is all one and the same. And the edges of the world rise
like mountains
clawing their way from under the earth.
And in the same way each year, chicks push upwards
and shake the world asunder again.
I coast for miles back to my black beach
and the man’s only trace are his footprints.
From across the headland, She calls to me
and She flies to tangle with me in our vast and silent sky.
Day 26
26. Girlhood, Boyhood
Oh, god! Look at you
jutting at the hip like you’ve never known the taste of
rejection pizza or chips salted with frustrated tears
lying on your messy bedsheets like they’ve never
held your nightmares, shaved clean like your god
chiselled you from marble and model genes
like your god is you, is you, is you
and on the seventh day, you took too many pills and threw up.
You eat air and breathe his smoke;
he’s a fuck-hungry snarling ferret of a boy
mink-coated and dull-eyed, and you can bet
that he buys and sells you back and forth like
the filth he puts in his lungs, like you’re illegal
and ugly and you grow like a cancer in his gut
until you say yes and he can light you up again
and pull your poison peace back in.
Just once
I would like to see him wear your eyeliner
and hear you be the one to ask him to lay off, babe
I’m tired.
Day 30
30. Catharsis
Remember how you bloomed in my chest
roses in my ribcage, splitting my lungs with their thorns
and the air poured out and with it the poison that had paralysed me for so long.
Strange how something wordless latched onto your lyrics
the wonder of being felt by something unfeeling
heard by a distant angel, released by sound and song.
In sinking I learned how to swim
and in hearing your voice I learned to listen to my own
shouting through water and weightlessness.
All this time I was holding onto a little girl
who I wasn’t any longer, telling her her wounds would heal
when she was mine all along.
Being alone felt raw and fragile at first
but I was reborn in bubbles and breath breaking the surface
a mermaid-girl, full-grown and fluent in her own tongue.
In front of the mirror I shimmer and ebb
and remember my dreams:
in them, flight feels like swimming, like being held by your element, cold and clear.
Moving through water is only difficult
as long as your feet still touch the seabed.
I kick off and I may not float free, but I swim. I swim. I swim.
Daisy Harris Poetry 