By Saskia Doherty
Soft gold and spins
In the closely pressed spaces
Between the sweat of palms
And ventricles
Drawn up by those of a different order
Others of a different stuff
Stuffed round fingers
I fill your cup and take a little from my own
Feeling a little cold, a little colder perhaps
Than I am allowed to in this moment
Bringing the sun down
To a gentle beat
The toeholds of frozen poses
A torch that searches for something to wrap
Its wandering self around
To grasp, to ground
Grandmothers say:
The world is a garden
And these shapes crystallise
From the inside out
Thinking about it is like thinking about a house:
The room for breathing
The room for fire
The chamber for dreamsmell
And passages between like scurries of tunnels
Adjoining city hospitals
Leading eye to ear
Chambers beating the stone knell of cope and core
And blood by gnarled knuckles
By paper-thin veils
In her hand a frangipani,
She becomes a girl again
Her mother had five heart attacks:
One for each petal
For about 15 years I have been trying to remember her stories
And for about 15 years I have failed
Because I don’t know how to hold them
Without those curt interruptions when
The conversation does not go her way
Or those hands that treasure the objects
She attaches to each one
I mean this in a loving way
I mean it heavy-tongued and weary
I do not know how to treat them in my mouth yet
Like the tree in the backyard of the boarding house
That she would hide in and eat raw quinces
Before she learned that starch needs to be tempered
With slow warmth and tender
I turn them in my mouth like pith
Maybe they just don’t fit
Sometimes I think maybe her bodyweight is exactly equal to that of her stories
And the trick is to catch them before they go
Sliding down the sternum
And slipping out below
When she lived in a house with a woman called Ma
Eggshells fed the chickens
A circular transmutation
Calcium spinning back into guts
And dispersed to bone
Mentally tracing the curvature of each vertebrae
Remembering the routes of a well-worn story
Forget words for a while: we’ll sit
Where binaries don’t fit
His stories were always her stories
And her story theirs
Sometimes your name is very slippery
Like these quicksilver wrists
Arranging flowers just-so
As corpses power televisions
And mushrooms compost flesh
We have found so many ways to dispose of ourself
I am anticipating that bit
Where the dead character breathes
We register the rise and fall of the stomach
As their body once again takes shape
Like Schrodinger’s cat:
Nine lives
I hope my lungs are up to the task
And I hope I can learn my lines