Growth/Decay

Sorry is a swollen word and it fills my stomach till I’m 

throwing up into the dandelion patch outside the back door.

Summer is lying lazy on the hills like a leopard sprawled in a tree and 

I have never felt so much like a cornered animal.

That’s the end, I write.  And I sign off.  And then it doesn’t end.

Golden hour gone sour

me wishing I could spit my grief into the gin-bottle

broken glass on the beach.  I don’t

cut my hair for weeks, my skin is messy with spots and I am always hanging

hanging, hoping for a fall.  

Suddenly it’s July, premature and full of rot, and they up my mother’s pain meds.

My legs are even longer than they were last year;

white against the black dock as my school-friends and I swim in the freezing loch.

Isn’t this fun?  And I grin at them.

No, this isn’t fun.  This is pain, controlled.  

A woman comes to the house and talks about the nicest ways our world could end.

Spilling out the back door into the sunlight I am swallowed by the furious hum of bees.

I am seventeen, I am seventeen and I am building a boat

because I can feel the flood coming in my back teeth

and I did not come this far just to drown.

It’s a classical summer; black flies and lemonade.

I think, Maycomb, Prairie, Watership Down.

Upstairs in a darkened room something silently grows

and downstairs, in the light, we are blown apart.

Daisy Harris

Dawn

I remember.

You sat strange and awkward among the furniture; and 

daddy wouldn’t like those dirty feet on our floors, and now I’m woven with the plants into the earth and

it doesn’t matter anymore.

Oh God!  Out in the trees, you made a terrible mess of it.

They will talk like I’m still here:

bubblegum girl, swelling to an airless burst

a scream in the night like the cat upset the record player and 

sent the needle scratching, scratch scratch scratch at my window for cigarettes

and silliness.  Where were you

when your fingers did something they’d regret?

‘m not scared.

Two perfect moons in the dusk, the dark holding the road

underwater, struggling for breath against

all the liquid sugar in my lungs.

If you swallow gum it stays for seven years

and where am I in seven years

in ten

in twelve

in a hundred?

Seventeen.  Back road.  Woods.  Night.

Boy.  Gun.

Daisy Harris

Inspired by ‘Dawn’ by Rose McGowan: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2v08xa

I take a moment to assess the state of my heart:

It’s not broken; it’s more like a butterfly in rain

rising rising sinking with each drop.

Red brick has replaced my blood, and my tongue is 

changed, I don’t know what it is but you sound really

Hard to tell how fast my spots change.  I don’t end with the edges of me.  I’m running down empty streets in my dreams

and I wake up having left myself at the end of a cul-de-sac.  Fuck it!!  I can’t reverse out of this one, 

my dad hates dead ends.  I wish he hadn’t named me after a flower which recedes at night.

By Daisy Harris

Written while listening to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8jReSoFs7Y

One thing I need to understand is why the Highlands are so spooky.  

Maybe because everything there happens in the space of a few breaths –

• every word you say has been said before, is being said, will be said –

because the hills are haunted and the woods are alive.

Because of the sense of being

watched.  History

does not just have its eyes on you; you are running through its fingers

like meltwater, and every song in your heart is sung through the pines.

Every ghost has room to breathe; every ghost has lungs and they fill with 

the wind off the peaks and the tinny rattle of swords died down to almost

nothing.  Stop

driving when the road signs are in an unpronounceable tongue

when you can feel the mountains’ gaze on the back of your neck.

Coorie down where the MacDonalds fell I 

dare you. 

Daisy Harris

This is my house; and this is where it was built

beside house after house after house

which looks just like it.  And here I am

singing its praises to the stars, kissing my

fragmented youth into its prefab walls

taking its picture when the moon is hale

and almost whole in the sky.  

Hold on, hold on, wait for the witching hour;

wait for what happens when 3am flings the earth-bound 

skyward in their awkward dreams.  Wait for me 

to join you in your sleeping reveries

and we breathe in – and I touch your face –

and we breathe out – and I teach you how to dance.

And we breathe in – 

and we watch the sun rise over three hundred

identical rooftops

and we don’t feel the cold

in our fairy-flossed limbs.

Daisy Harris

My entry into National Poetry Day’s #SpeakYourTruthPoem contest, titled ‘Oxford Road’.

i

I am alone on a plane

and I am fragile and physical, blood in my head;

I found my god in chaos, while you searched

for yours under my skin.  

I left myself miles away

where the great rivers of traffic intersect 

south of London.  You’re under the sea

breathing your lies into the damaged ecosystems

while my heart tries to recover from yours.

Love, love, a false prophet, plastic 

in your lungs.  The air here smells of pine resin

and I am not your broken home any longer.  

Daisy Harris

Warm Beer

Sometimes he gets banished to the woods

and so he goes, teenage limbs flung against trees

his curses butterflies buffeted by rage, weaving a haphazard path

back home to a father who smokes on the porch

and a mother who watches, watches.

A figure has clawed itself out 

from under the earth, and lazes among the forest’s bloodless veins

brown with muddy afterbirth.  It looks up as he approaches;

smiles, and the lines pressed into its bronzed face by centuries

deepen.

“What the hell are you?” he says.  His legs jump with outrage.

His coltish heart wants to run, but the figure breathes

and the wind weaves its music through its wilted lungs

and he is still.  He doesn’t have a choice.  

Perhaps the light was less, when last the sun held 

that face in its tawny fingers.  Every peat-browned pore

is a marvel.  He 

doesn’t look away as he edges around the clearing

to the tree-stump where he keeps rations.

Tall blue cans.  The cheap kind, from the gas station.

His father stockpiles them in a shed, doesn’t notice

when one or two go missing.  He pulls one out 

and pops the tab, flinching at the dry hiss.  The figure’s

eyes are cat-bright; its loose limbs trusting.  Curiosity

is written in the tilt of its head. 

He takes a sip; it’s warm and hoppy and slightly sour.

He holds it out to the figure.  Fingers close around the can

they look like time had poured mud in a mould.   

It keeps its eyes on him

as it sniffs the beer.  The mouth quirks; recognition, vague.

It takes a noisy gulp.  He takes a step back 

to perch on the tree-stump.  It follows.

He shuffles a little to make room

even though the stump is really only big enough for one.  

They sit side-by-side and pass the can 

back and forth.  His next sip

tastes like peat.  

He looks at the hole the figure crawled out of

for a very long time.  Well, not a long time, perhaps

if you know what a long time really is.

“Who put you in there?” he asks, motioning to the 

raw earth.

The figure looks at him for a long moment.  Then it wipes

the foam from its upper lip and belches.  He laughs.  

They take another sip.

Daisy Harris

Inspired by Hozier, Siobhan Dowd, Seamus Heaney and anyone else who’s ever written about bog bodies in a creepy but reverent way.

Sometimes I remember your hands;

they’re nice hands, aren’t they?  Boyishly large, the bones abstract sketches under the skin

nervous hands, nervous like whatever it is your face does when you think about the future.

Sometimes I remember being flung across a bed, alone and itching childishly 

with want.  Thinking

my soul feels sick.  My soul feels sick when 

I’m not with him.

Sometimes I remember every primal moment, whenever your skin was on my skin

was in my sleep, made fuses of my nerve endings, made a windblown rose of my heart

and my ribcage the only thing that held me together besides every thought

every warm and waning thought of you.  

You.

Then I remember how you don’t look at me 

the way I remember you.  

How longing is my bitter wine, how my heart 

folds its arms in your face, how eyes I once fell in turbulent and perfect love with

now look right past me, as though I were a scorned thing 

the stars spat out.  

I remember, and I

understand, finally

why humanity has almost eaten itself off the face of the earth.  

Daisy Harris

Who will I be in Manchester?

A variant of who I was here?

Cheekboney and unhinged;

visibly anaemic and buzzing with need.

Will they be able to smell the woods on me?

– the others, who crawl inwards from suburbs

I have seen from trains, up and down, for the past six months

I will have to explain, all over again, why I don’t have 

a mother fawning over me in my dorm room, why 

I wash my hands so much.  Dress like I’m ancient, talk

like I’m fucking hard.  Fuck the Tories, fuck the 

world that made me so hungry and aged me 

so fast.  Kiss like I’m over it, kiss like 

a student, drink the way my sorrow taught me, kiss

again.  You’ve an interesting face, people tell me, so I

Google what that means.  You’re a messy drunk, 

people tell me, so I say sorry twice as loud.  Music

remains, my unburned bridge, because shared headphones

equals shared time, even if the notes echo backwards

in other ears.  Who will I be among taller buildings?

Smaller?  

Daisy Harris