Remembrance of an Open Wound
Whenever we make love, you say
it’s like fucking a crash –
I bring the bus with me into the bedroom.
There’s a lull, like before the fire brigade
arrives, flames licking the soles
of our feet. Neither of us knows
when the petrol tank will explode.
You say I’ve decorated my house
to recreate the accident –
my skeleton wired with fireworks,
my menagerie flinging air about.
You look at me in my gold underwear –
a crone of sixteen, who lost
her virginity to a lightning bolt.
It’s time to pull the handrail out.
I didn’t expect love to feel like this –
you holding me down with your knee,
wrenching the steel rod from my charred body
quickly, kindly, setting me free.
Pascale Petit’s sixth collection Fauverie was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and a suite of poems from it won the Manchester Poetry Prize. Her fifth, What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year. This is her website.
Note: Remembrance of an Open Wound is taken from What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010)