Where Esther Went
Beast
I crawl out that gap and I am
Four legged, I am beast
Headed, bristle-
Backed, yellow-nailed.
Long years it has waited,
Grub in the stone dark,
Worm of fear buried
Until love turned it out
Like a bean from its skin
To cultivate in that moisture,
Farmed tissue and bone,
Matched a transfusion of blood
To make a blood self
To shift between worlds.
Here it is, married skin
And hair, a steal
Of teeth grown beyond
Code; footpad, thief
Of me that heaves a belly
Lust-heavy, in love
But silenced, its voice
Stitched into its mouth.
Fire
I survived the fire I started.
Maybe I was born of fire
And could stand it.
They all died in their beds.
The cock gave the alarum call,
Blood on the tiles, the dead recalled.
In the night the dead came over a sea
Oiled with the beating of hands.
They had one face, my family,
They were power, they meant suffer;
Fear was a man with chicken feet
Who flapped his fear-wings.
My mother had an apron I pulled,
Hands like burlap smelling of crusts
In the cracks of her knuckles,
A gold ring that slipped.
At dawn the cockerel croaked.
I fled, the house burnt out, killing him
With one flat stone that skimmed
And hit like a spinning blade.
Years then, in the badlands,
Anything you could get
Meaning what they’d give you
On the back seats of cars
That took their children to school
And their wives to church.
It wasn’t the first for a girl raped
Before the cock woke his wives.
Fire comes from that breakage.
Then came the women who’ve made
Another world alongside this.
When they picked me up I was lost
Alright, beaten, naked, bitten,
Cigarette burns the length of my back,
Hair torn in chunks from the scalp,
Face a bloody mess
Found, they said, by the smell
Of my blood and shit and the Gretel
Trail of it along the disused underpass,
I was almost gone, fucked,
Left for dead.
They put me under where you don’t dream.
I woke re-stitched, the pain a distant
Ship I could wave to but not reach
Sailing its quiet ellipsis.
The kiss on the train was a trap.
I’d been sent to catch a man
To pay man back.
Cocks could crow all they liked,
We’d cut those cocks out.
But love like the devil
Stuck his hand in my belly.
I had to leave to work
Out what love was.
Once more underground
They dance until I am flesh-bound,
Bone-tired, two-legged again,
Sweating a pint of myself.
I owe a debt.
I am still not initiate. Can I
Kill what love has touched?
Those girls give me the knife.