All The Men I Never Married E-Book

Kim Moore

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 69

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

"If this poetry collection were a concert it would be a virtuoso performance warranting a standing ovation" Nation. Cymru"A culturally significant book that everyone, everywhere – irrespective of their sex – should definitely read" Buzz Magazine"Kim Moore's brave and open-hearted new collection does not offer any form of resolution to the significant questions it sets itself, but rather a working through of continuing anxieties and turmoil" Steve WhitakerMoore explores a world of femininity and abuse in this brave collection. Travelling between childhood and adult life, she documents the honest reality of living with a woman's body in a world that at times makes her miss the 'easy misogyny' of an office setting. Comparing her femininity to water Moore uncovers the flexibility that she is forced to perform throughout as she reflects on her previous experience in volatile situations: discussing and experiencing shame, victim-blaming, resentment and guilt. The collection gracefully flies through the experiences of relationships and how her trauma manifests as different animals inside her. All The Men I Never Married leaves a lasting impression of the realism behind Moore's relationships.

Leseprobe

All the Men I Never Married

This book is dedicated to my daughter, Ally.

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

Suite 6, 4 Derwen Road, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 1LH

www.serenbooks.com

facebook.com/SerenBooks

twitter@SerenBooks

The right of Kim Moore to be identified as

the author of this work has been asserted in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

© Kim Moore, 2021.

ISBN: 978-1-78172-641-9

ebook: 978-1-78172-642-6

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without

the prior permission of the copyright holder.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Books Council of Wales.

Cover artwork: © Fred Tomaselli 2021.

Images courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.

Printed in Bembo by Severn, Gloucester.

Contents

We are coming

There was the boy I met on the park

Many years ago

we walked into the beginning of summer

his dad handing out shots

We hated the way you followed us around

That a man approached you in a nightclub

Imagine you’re me, you’re fifteen

On the train a man asks me what I’m reading

Nothing has changed you still live at home

two hours with you

Once I knew a man

After the reading

Although we’ve only just met

I imagine you at home

I knew he was dangerous

When you rewind what happened

One of my exes

This is not love

Your job was drinking

It’s just me and him

When he tells me I’m not allowed

That night which I knew would be the last night

It didn’t really help

She told me that when she woke

When I tell them about my body

Once I went on what he called a date

Each week you jumped up and down

Now that I’m with you

Once I knew a man

On the way

I’m making this a #NotAllMen free zone

You lived there for a week

I knew him

I clip the mic to the bell of my trumpet

You are telling me about the city

he did not come to me as a swan

There’s always a train

The night I left home

I told you touching would spoil everything

Also my ex

If I’m ever bored of monogamy

Is it rape

When I open my ribs

I saw him fall

Remember that night we’d been out drinking

I let a man into my room

All night a bird beats its wings

When he told me not to tell the story

Acknowledgements

The past is magnified when it is no longer shrunk.

We make things bigger just by refusing to make things smaller.

Sara Ahmed

How are we to represent, in writing, the fact that sexual desire lives

entangled with sexual violence? How are we to deal, in art, with

the powerful, destabilizing forces of both violence and desire?

Katherine Angel

We are coming under cover of darkness,

with our strawberry marks, our familiars,

our third nipples, our ill-mannered bodies,

our childhoods spent hobbled like horses

where we were told to keep our legs closed,

where we sat in the light of a window and posed

and waited for the makers of the world

to tell us again how a woman is made.

We are arriving from the narrow places,

from the spaces we were given, with our curses

and our spells and our solitude, with our potions

we swallow to shrink us small as insects

or stretch us into giants, for yes, there are giants

amongst us, we must warn you. There will be riots,

we’re carrying all that we know about silence

as we return from the forests and towers,

unmaking ourselves, stepping from the pages

of books, from the eye of the camera, from the cages

we built for each other, the frames of paintings,

from every place we were lost and afraid in.

We stand at the base of our own spines

and watch tree turn to bone and climb

each vertebra to crawl back into our minds,

we’ve been out of our minds all this time,

our bodies saying no, we were not born for this,

dragging the snare and the wire behind us.

1.

There was the boy I met on the park

who tasted of humbugs

and wore a mustard-yellow jumper

       and the kickboxer with beautiful long brown hair

           that he tied with a band at the nape of his neck

and the one who had a constant ear infection

    so I always sat on his left

       and the guy who worked in an office

            and could only afford to fill up his car

            with two pounds worth of petrol

and the trumpet player I loved

from the moment I saw him

     dancing to the Rolling Stones

       and the guy who smoked weed

       and got more and more paranoid

       whose fingers flickered and danced

       when he talked

and the one whose eyes were two pieces

of winter sky

and a music producer

long-legged and full of opinions

        and more trumpet players

           one who was too short and not him

           one who was too thin and not him

are you judging me yet, are you surprised?

Let me tell you of the ones I never kissed

    or who never kissed me

the trombonist I went drinking with

how we lay twice a week in each other’s beds

     like two unlit candles

we were not for each other and in this we were wise

we were only moving through the world together for a time

there was a double bassist who stood behind me

and angled the body of his bass into mine

and shadowed my hands on its neck

and all I could feel

was heat from his skin

    and the lightest breath

        and even this might have been imagined

I want to say to them now

    though all we are to each other is ghosts

once you were all that I thought of

when I whisper your names

it isn’t a curse or a spell or a blessing

     I’m not mourning your passing or calling you here

this is something harder

like walking alone

in the dusk and the leaves

   this is the naming of trees

        this is a series of flames

          this is watching you all disappear.

2.

Many years ago, I lived in a house in the woods.

The woodcutter visited on nights when the moon

hid itself between the clouds.

Sometimes I go back to watch it happen again,

slip inside the body of the woodcutter,

to feel what it felt like to be him.

His arms and legs are heavier than mine.

The cigarettes on his heart, his lungs, his chest.

His finger to his lips, biting the nail to the quick.

I start to lose the border of where

his pain and mine begin and end.

I am in the body of the woodcutter.

But I am not the body of the woodcutter.

His body is a shallow dish and I’m a slick of water.

If I move too much, I’ll spill out and over.

What I’ve really come back for is me,

ten years younger. Through his eyes,

she looks small and pale, a wisp of smoke

he could walk right through. Her face

turned in. Her mouth shut tight.

She smells of flight and all the things

this body hates. But when he presses her

to the ground, she vanishes inside herself

and nobody can reach her.

His tongue spits words I’d never say, and yet

here I am, inside his body saying them.

I leave the body of the woodcutter.

I leave it all behind – her, the house, the trees.

I return to myself, begin again.

Many years ago, I lived in a house in the woods.

3.