The Angel Gabriel Visits Mary in Bedlam (Ecce Ancilla Domini!)
After Dante Gabriel Rossetti
look at the dove so wide a suicide against the wall
wrap it up in the blue cloth I’ve been keeping it
unwrinkled for such a purpose long blue tongue of heaven
little feathers I want to wash my hair confession I sang
the dove in they’re going to cut my hair for copper coins
sacrificial blade of my scalp he comes in and I know
he is flat and naked his burning ankles gristle of barbed wire
they took my bones away like the dove lighter than air
I want to wash my hair he holds out a wired jaw of lilies
two starburst and one unbroken and I tell him no
Doctor’s Note: she has been speaking in tongues again.
my shift is a grubby devout face over my legs my knees
their blue is lunar he’s still there his broken jaw in the act
of mending his hair is so clean I can’t see the door its greased handle
I can miracle wine from my nose his lilies are so white they are blue
I tell him no and offer him the dove instead wrapped up
he smiles all he wanted was a little broken body a pale thing
to take all the stains of his mannishness to char by the sparks
of his ankles he swallows the door after himself the lilies
have some Latin name that cuts my throat to say open blue window
there’s a song my mother sang do you want to hear it
Ellora Sutton’s poetry has been published in Poetry Review, The North, Popshot, and Berlin Lit, amongst others. She reviews poetry for Mslexia. Her latest pamphlet, antonyms for burial, is out now from Fourteen Poems. She tweets @ellora_sutton.
Note: The Angel Gabriel Visits Mary in Bedlam won the Art to Poetry Award (run jointly by the Poetry Society and Artlyst), and was published on The Poetry Society website.
Snow Queen
Trapped in her shadowy room, Mary Queen of Scots embroiders snowdrops on taut linen. Fleurs de perce-neige, she whispers, remembering the pale gardens of childhood, when they would push through the hard earth, insistent as a stiletto blade – pretty February maids all in a row. How one day she took pity on them, the splay of their ragged heads, sleet-punched, lolling, their little hearts nearly broken; how she brought them indoors, how the servants hid their eyes – poisonous little corpses in their battered shrouds.
At night she hears the rush of water, a nearby river — or is it rain? She cannot distinguish horizontal, vertical. Does not know which way up she is in this slow cold world where she endlessly dreams of blood on snow, snow on blood.
Sue Burge is a writing tutor, mentor and editor based in North Norfolk, UK. Her four poetry collections are: In the Kingdom of Shadows and Confetti Dancers (Live Canon), Lumière and The Saltwater Diaries (Hedgehog Poetry Press). www.sueburge.uk
Crunch
You fling the book down,
I ask what you’ve been reading, you snarl:
The complete works of Alma Cogan.
Like hell you have. I throw some crappy novel at you
say, here, have this shit, but it’s one of your own.
This is how we go on; we are the embodiment
of a car’s flat battery turning over with irritation
on a frigid Christmas Eve when nobody’s going anywhere.
Look at Noddy, Big Ears,
those colouring songs we used to sing—
what became of those photos of granny,
dressed in red leather to go biking or hiking,
could be either. She’d go anywhere armed with
Blenkinsop’s Theory of Survival;
over Niagara once in a porcelain bucket, lined with charcoal.
Her frock was blackened. She claimed the air
at the top the falls the air was thinner:
she wanted to test the theory.
Happy Christmas, Happy Christmas,
Twinkle, Twinkle little crunch, you murmur,
lost in the sound of a satisfying murder.
Who’s it to be this time? You stand up,
thrust your hands deep in your pockets and walk away.
A blessing be upon your house, you say,
let us sail along beneath the silvery moon.
You bastard. We’ve been here before,
humbler times, best ignored.
There’s a painting on the wall: a hayrick leans
across the way, in a field full of cabbages.
You told me your sister’s bought a Bedlington terrier
called Molly, sweet Molly Malone.
I don’t understand the meaning of cities,
or numbers, but I know there once was a baker,
she had a mother and a child,
she wrote poems for strange times, weary times, warring times.
This is the wonder of you, that you had such a person
in your life and I never knew. She had sisters—five!
And fifty guinea pigs, she fed them brussels sprouts
but no more than one each; they squeaked in the delirium,
the greedy guzzlers, but now they cry
with the voices of silence, bewailing the rise
of butterfly breeders, they insist the caterpillars
should have their say and regret the elders’ wings.
Poor old Bing is crumbling away, his paper is useless.
There’s no music now, in the whole of the south.
Henry Purcell was just passing by, he left us his song.
You claim to have patented 12 million seashells,
you say they tinkle down on the beach and dare me to go there,
but I know where lines meet beyond the possibilities of parallel;
I’ve moved far past Euclid, and this is where
I capture you in your dark planets.
Slowly, but surely, the butcher and baker
leave town by starlight, no moon.
They say it’s cold. It’s not cold.
Following stars and nebulae—you have no idea, Tink,
no idea at all. You can see the village from here,
the glistening roofs. We’ll have a hard frost tonight,
and anyone scurrying home in glass slippers
may lose a toe or two, but nothing’s been broken.
No one’s disturbed. The oil slick
slips beneath the trees and into the ocean.
So sleep now, like a patient under anaesthetic,
lost in a world of abstruse realities.
Count down from a hundred, take the last boat to Prague,
forget my voice. You’ve never heard it.
Catherine Naisby is a musician, artist and writer whose publications (as ‘Catherine Edmunds’) include two poetry collections, five novels and a Holocaust memoir, as well as numerous short stories and poems in journals such as Aesthetica, Crannóg, and Poetry Scotland.