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Poetry

Short stories

Poetry

Titles:
The wheelchair
Sex in a Vauxhall Estate
Where were we then?
The map badge: lost at Queen St. station
Death - in fourteen words
Geraniums
Handbag
The wheelchair

Pulling the wheelchair out of the boot
Was painful, distasteful even.
It was too big, too awkward
For the boot of my small car.
I did get it out though,
Forced the seat down
Clanked the metal foot rests
Into place
Hurried to her side of the car
To heave her out into the morning
We did not notice.
I pushed that chair as if
It were a light doll’s pram
Up the hospital ramp
Along and against the blank resistance
Of each disinfected corridor –
Through three swing doors
Which banged at my heels
Neatly clipping our flight
To his room, his last bedside.
It was she who sat beside him,
Her will pinned me
To the bottom of the bed.
But it was me who caught
My father’s quick glance
Into the garden,
Where Red Admirals
Danced above the Budleia,
Held him,
As if he were theirs.

Sex in a Vauxhall Estate

Sorrow came to her in a long moan,
Blacking out her sense of it,
Stilling her lust, like a moth in a lampshade
Heat shocked into exhaustion.
She lost the slow pace of it
Right near the gear stick of his Vauxhall Estate.
The end was fearful as if she had been tongued
To death, loved too ridiculously hard, and found wanting.
What she feared most was his mounting resentment,
The long reproach, her own ridiculousness.
Why had she not lost herself as Derrick had?
She lay still, slumped on his anorak, hoping
The bright red Vauxhall would take her home soon.

Where were we then?

Where were we then, when perched on her chair,
Home from school, I told of my day?
Where were we then and what was the room?
Was it the one with the large French windows,
The garden surprised by its borders,
The jasmine prolific and overpowering?
Was it too soon to hear of your memories,
Not of that place but others well past,
Was it that place where I could have drawn near to you,
Was it that place, or, nowhere at all?

The map badge: lost at Queen St. station

I was safe until Queen St station
deep in his left hand pocket next to his chewing gum,
just enough freedom to lie
in a Sainsbury’s soft peach tissue, family size,
from the store at the end of the Pinhoe road.
He forgot me at the junction
where Queen Street meets St David’s,
pulled out the tissue
with me in its folds.
I tried to land colour up, offered
Queensbury Plaza No 7 and St Ely Ave E-F
so boldly, I thought he could not miss me
but he was already inside that station
buying his ticket
to Exmouth for the day.

Death – in fourteen words

Death came to her in ecstatic fervour
Though she was one of these women
Who said fuck
But had never truly sucked a cock
Or held a buttock slap
Or smelled of lingering cunnillingus
And truly felt the sense of it.
Sadly her breath was interrupted
Just as she thought
A new poem had come.
Oh, the pressure of death,
The terrible act of it.
Do you know it entirely killed off her skin,
Shut down each and every organ,
Systematically, until she was dead,
Emphatically.
 
Geraniums

It is a hoary January whose clasp
Sets at odds the skittering blue tits
And the stiffened Geraniums
In their pots,
No bright red petals, no signals
Of Summer,
This is the month when
Nothing blooms,
Except anxiety
So sharp, its light
Could yield up a whole field
Of Geraniums, marking out
Our garden as if for flight.

Handbag

Lining frayed quite precisely, black, like a draft extractor
Inside, parking tickets, eg Lime Kiln Long Stay, B/Salt.
Was that salt marshes, vast and white, or Budleigh
Salterton, pebble beach and river estuary, wetland for seabirds?
This ticket brings on counting 080506 Vat No 142 2189 90
Were there three Egrets and five Widgeon and eighty two Gulls,
At the estuary that day, or did I make it up?
The note from Nigel, meet at 11.00am,
‘Titian, Nymph and Shepherd’, title of a recommended book,
This last in my handwriting but like the endless loose change
Spilled from the bottom of the bag,
Useless in the adding up of things.
 

CV


Publications
thinking through art

Curation & Catalogue


PhD Examining

Routledge Companion to research in the arts

JAVC journal

Links

 
 
    © Katy Macleod 2020