HOURS Writers - Shot 3.pdf - Luke Palmer

Please enable JavaScript to view the full PDF

HOURS Writers – Shot 3 – The Poems released 7th April 2021 Helen Sheppard Blue One wintry Saturday afternoon, I tip my nan's sewing box out. She isn't dead, just overseeing what's long inside. Each cantilevered compartment a rainbow of embroidery threads, poppers in pairings, knicker elastic, mushroom darner, skirt and bra extenders for when women quietly bloat. Hundreds of fruit drop buttons stored separately in a shortbread biscuit tin. I make a brew, we read news stories on back of hand-made patterns. In an envelope are years old newsheet shapes for a baby's bonnet never stitched I read a headline, INFANT DIES AS FATHER PERFORMS OPERATION AT HOME. I cut two slices of fruitcake, wait. ‘Poor boy, collapsed, bronchitis. His father Doctor Smith, lovely man, intelligent talker, cut open son's chest with a razor blade. The mother left soon after.' Nan picks out blue ribbon, 'he always was a dear lad', winds around a bobbin, secures with a pin Fish Fingers and Baked Beans I remember door knocks, neighbours; in labour, borrowing tenners for gas, private Clearblue pregnancy tests. I remember delivering a dead baby, being cathartically sick on Merlot, waking on Anna's sofa under blankets. I remember forgetting to collect my kids from school, delayed by an emergency c-section. Tina dished out snacks and telly. I remember picnics in snow and torrents, tree climbing, mud slides. Picking up our shredded threads of mothering. I remember one night, the kids taking turns projectile vomiting off bunk beds and a long list of home visits next day. I remember waste, strikes, cuts in care, mountains of recording, litigation dread, fishfingers and baked beans for a week. I remember sobbing in your kitchen, resignation letter sealed and stamped, I remember to toast many mothers. Things I Now Know Warm hands, first step to care. Nurse, with a vivid imagination. Illness demands community. Caring is fifty percent intuition. NHS have no magic wands. Time is still - we fly through. A prescription is not a cure. There is no known sleep bank. Disgust protects us from disease. Snorkelling is a suckling reflex. Mothers feed any open mouths. Love tears us apart and binds us. Luke Palmer from In all my books my father dies my father thought he could hide in my stomach ― a great big knot that lied worms and maggots his voice started to hammer against the walls. Loud clunks in the cradle. Father full of tears whole head ready to burst breath between heaves vomit- coughing ease the ache in my stomach. By God what a state to get yourself in. Born in Hell’s West Side, World War II, attended University, acclaimed early: won awards ― was serialised in Playboy Magazine (without permission) “A rooster, bound by a grave as palace servants to an emperor!” Seated in a throne-like chair ― Father! A magnificent suite of rooms a deep garden the smell of lemon trees inside, sofas deep as small ships. Arms held out, standing, massively leonine eyes two slabs of mahogany mouth surprisingly delicate, imperial. He was all huge. Enormous. He decided very quickly, lowered his soul to unconscious form, blood leaking through his body. Terrible times, merciful deeds. He grievously wounded among the undying spoke his urgent message: I know my shivering. The chills tell me I died at just the right time, yielding to a smooth black future. I am no longer among the quick but I have memory left. I try to list my children. I’ve got ghosts and children from ear to ear. The first few swell to greet me; a rousing tribute. I am disposed to glow ― beguiling father on my deathbed, neither here nor there. Don’t worry don’t worry. Bathe him. Let him shiver if he doesn’t want to go. Answers on The Witness I house the Witness in a small pocket of my chest full of herringbones and dust Its elbows pull at my heart’s valves like a stent It weighs just less than a collapsing star its mass all drag and yaw as if it reaches through a door in my spine and hooks on any passing thing It pulls me back asks that I stand far off It eases me apart lets my head and body carry forward while a piece drops out to wait behind It speaks before I can and marvels at the glimmer on the surface I collect these shadows my voice echoes of the light that it makes I am not proud but for now I will keep the Witness warm distrust the night when I must carry the Witness to the river a tied sack in a crate full of bricks A Fine Hospital The hospital is here! Every morning new types of coma bloom I can hear them in the grass Trees too are waking to the hospital The first bud of each coma splits their bark In the valley the river sings hospital You were dead on your way to the spring In the deepest flower on the flower scale Sometimes the smell of a coma overwhelms me It’s like the hospital is in my gut We must be thankful for all these beautiful comas I can’t remember a better hospital Certainly it’s the finest on record There has been so little rain except at night We look out of the spring’s windows wonder if you’ll ever leave this flower If every hospital was like this one we’d want for nothing Every day I put fresh-cut comas in a vase It seems a shame that each coma wilts browns and dies But there are so many more to be picked If I could bottle this hospital I would and bring it to you lying in the spring inside of a flower Sophie Dumont Adolescent We take off our watches and melt, lips first then limbs into limbs. Foxes move moonlight with their screams, the mole repositions his black, and badgers press together, speaking perfume. I leave red on the white of my mattress, spilt ink after a signature; this is moving closer, I stink of nearly adult. My body has a calendar, it hits like a gong on the nose of the month. It is heavier since we melted. In the bath my red swirls from me, a sub-aquatic vapor — nothing smells underwater. I wait until the red and the transparent are inseparable — pink and towel onto my neck the reek of an adult sun. (Published in The Interpreter’s House Issue 68) Canesten 500mg Pessary I half expect them to rattle the moment I pop the applicator and the little white tablet settles on the wall of my vagina. Every month the girl behind the counter tells me to do it at night – cleaner that way, and in return I hurry her with a lie about a diagnosis of thrush, hand her the tenner and walk home with the box under my arm. I take a stinging piss, sink into duvet and let the streetlight find its way through the gap between blind and window to yellow my thighs. For three days after I quietly fizz. My pessaries dissolve to the movement of the 43 bus, to the cross-legged clapping at the theatre, to the strides up Park Street stunted by pencil skirt. I put one up me 35,997 feet above sea level and when I land in India I handwash clothes in a blue bucket and thumbnail-scrape white paste off my pants. I’d have a white bouquet of applicators if I collected them all. My pessaries are proof. They come after long weekends of feeling effervescent, of pints on King Street, of drinking coffee when thirsty, of climbing into each other’s pink newness. (Published in The Moth Issue 43) Word Heave I used to sleep with an encyclopedia beneath my pillow I believed the hard facts would turn soft under my weight and spill into my ears I would season my meals with ripped up notes cast away from my father’s desk and fold the words into my pasta until they became translucent my dictionaries still make my mouth wet but I don’t think it’s about consumption anymore I’ve noticed myself retching out something at night usually after I’ve heard your words and I think I ate too much as a child I try and leave words where they might not be noticed like that scene in The Great Escape where the men shake the soil from their trousers and kick it into the earth yes I need to be lighter excrete some of it fast because we talk when the light bulbs have been cold for hours and I feel a retch coming and I sweat with the prospect of what might come out (Published in Flint, the Bath Spa University MA anthology, 2019) First Impressions You introduce yourself and the base vibration of your voice is oatmeal and buttermilk. I offer you my name and the mustard yellow of its letters rolls from my lips — I’ve given you a sunflower the moment before the sun sinks to somewhere else. Our hands shake and a loamy memory wipes across my palette. Now we don’t talk in separate beds. My cereal tastes of cereal and I wonder what you heard in me. (Published in Flint, the Bath Spa University MA anthology, 2019)