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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
A Telegraph Book of the Year 2024 A Financial Times Poetry Book of the Year 2024 Caroline Bird's new poems show us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending. This is a collection about marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery in which a recurring dream is playing out: a world where mums impale themselves on pogo-sticks, serial killers rattle around in basements, baby monitors are haunted by someone else's baby and, through it all, love stays and stays like a stationary rollercoaster that turns out to be the scariest, most thrilling ride in the amusement park. Her editor welcomed the book in these terms: 'It is bleak, repellent and hilarious in an American Psycho-ish way. Hectic and vivid.' 'Vegetable crisps. The words yawn like a black hole, sucking my eyes backwards into my head until I see my own brain glowing like a radioactive cauliflower.'
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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3
Contents
7
‘Just when the water was settled and at home’
– Richard Hugo8
Ambush at Still Lake
The Standstiller
I pick up my souvenir photo.
Unruffled hair. A steady gaze.
‘Wait, so it literally doesn’t move?’
you ask, windswept from the dodgems.
‘Not a millimetre!’ I say, re-joining
the queue. You suggest the Eternal
Abyss Turbo Plunge instead.
‘Trust me,’ I say, ‘This one’s scarier.’
I steer us onto the wheelless train
but, at the last moment, you panic
and bail. ‘I’ll be right here
on the platform,’ you say, waving
as the restraints come down and off
I go, staying beside you.
Dream Job
The three-year-old boss
of our imaginary café
is conducting his daily stocktake.
‘Cabbages? Yes. Chocolate? Yes.
Carrots…?’
He looks around, consults
his palm like a clipboard.
‘Here you are,’ I say, magicking
a bunch from my pocket,
‘Fresh and crunchy.’
He stares at me.
‘That’s not carrots,’ he says,
‘That’s nothing.’
So it is. Business suffers.
No pretend biscuits. No pretend milk.
I ring up our wholesale distributor.
The dial tone is fuzzy, fleshy.
‘That’s not a phone, that’s your hand.’
Fuck. I’ve made international calls
from that number, lucrative deals –
yesterday we sold pizzas,
horses, islands, trains
with personalised choo-choos.
You name it, we had it.
Now, suddenly, the opposite.
Peas? No. Eggs? No. Chicken? No.
It’s an emptying, an exodus.
Invisible shelves all bare.
Already I can picture a throng
of disgruntled customers,
banging down our doors 13
shouting ‘Call this a tomato?’
demanding refunds
when the money just isn’t there
and the boss, he’s so calm,
poking playdoh in his office
like he’s been fudging discrepancies
in the books for some time,
watching his Ponzi scheme crash
and pretty soon, he knows
the nee-naws will come
and he’ll turn to me, handcuffed
and say wasn’t it great
while it lasted though, Mum?
Didn’t we want
for nothing?
Last Rites
Nannie Edna couldn’t accept that her dying wish was borderline psychopathic. ‘But it’s what I want!’ she rasped through her breathing apparatus. We tried suggesting more conventional alternatives (swimming with dolphins, a hot air balloon ride, a video call with Michael Ball) but she wasn’t interested. She wanted to dangle her great-grandson from her apartment window. ‘By the ankle!’ she kept saying, as if we might agree to let her dangle him by the arm and accidentally disappoint her. When we said no, she went through the five stages of grief. ‘But I’m dying…?’ and ‘You don’t trust me! You’ve never trusted me!’ She lifted her heavy handbag and held it in the air, shaking, for a good five minutes: ‘See? I wouldn’t drop him.’ We didn’t know what to say. Tears ran sideways down her face. Finally, she closed her eyes. ‘My own family believes I am capable of dropping a newborn baby from a twelve-storey building and, deep down, I suppose, I’ve always known this about myself,’ she said, slipping away.
Ants
The cereal cupboard is alive
with errant mannerisms
like droplets of coffee in space
shaped like the dark apertures
of tiny keyholes.
Truant crochets
who bunked off their orchestral scores
to avoid being reduced
to one note
and now silently roam the octaves
of tin and shelf
with no idea who they are.
I fix the crevice nozzle
to my vacuum cleaner
and switch it on.
Come on, you shrunken comet tails.
You mincing motes.
It’s harvest time.
I open the cupboard door
like peeling back my scalp
to catch the lost neurons
and one by one, I pick them off.
Each laid bare and manic
like a toddler’s scribble 16
made sentient by a tab of acid.
Think you’re safe under the cat food?
Think again.
It’s kinder than poison, I tell myself,
picturing them still lucid
in the hoover bag
upside down, hysterical
in the roaring dark.
And just when they think I’m finished
I come back for the stragglers
until my cupboard is clean
and my mind is in order
and I can finally leave
to collect my son from nursery
yet all the while I’m thinking
under the skirting boards,
a tin I didn’t check,
the survivors are
fizzling, cold with relief.
They reunite by the Cheerios
to recover the bodies.
High and low, they search
an empty battlefield.
Not even a blackened smear,
an eyelash of a leg. It’s as if
the sky just parted
and sucked their comrades in. 17
They hold a meeting,
speak pheromonally
of the rapture
when the black hole opened
and they were not chosen
but left behind, wingless,
to continue in a Godless land
where lawlessness now has
the upper hand.
