The Dead Queen of Bohemia E-Book

Jenni Fagan

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 87

Beschreibung

The Dead Queen of Bohemia is a journey through a life lived on the edge. With a poetic style influenced by Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs, this collection is woven with surrealistic imagery that is both unflinching and dislocating. Fagan's poetry is raw and tough yet beautiful and tender and with themes of loss and recovery, hope and defiance, represents a clarion call from a self-taught poet who started writing at the age of seven and so far has not stopped. The Dead Queen of Bohemia documents the progression of a voice and a life written over the last twenty years. It opens with Jenni's most recent work and includes her previous two collections, both now out of print.

Leseprobe

The Dead Queen of Bohemia

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Limited

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Jenni Fagan, 2016

Illustrations copyright © Nathan Thomas Jones, 2016

The right of Jenni Fagan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 1 84697 339 0

eBook ISBN 978 0 85790 898 8

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Koinonia, Manchester

Printed and bound by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

for Boo

Contents

Collection I: New Poems

I Wanna Be Your Dog

Back in the Caravan (or the Wolf & the Minstrel)

I Swam in Blue

Poem After Listening to Neruda

Cold as a Girl

Instruction Manual for Suicidal Girls (Boys, Trolls & Troglodytes)

Tic-Tac-Toe

I Had Been Excited to Hear a Blue Light from the Inside

Lie Down

Six Hours to Sunrise

Thirteen

Wicked Willy

Our Last Card

Unrequited

Daffodils

Pretty Girls Dig Graves

The Writer is Present

The Man Was Not the Man

He Was an Actor (18) He Liked to Listen to the Theatre Breathe

Exit Stage Left, Admitting the Abyss

The Fall of Then

The Secret Seal Wife

Vertebrae & Friends

The Narcissist & the Light Stasher

When I Say Shoe, I Mean Converse (Old & Tattered As)

Kintsugi

The Rocks, the Crags & the Sun-Worm

New Poem

It Would Have Been the Actions of an Insane Woman, but I Know the Thought of it Would Have Amused You

We Are Haunted by the Dead

I Can’t Remember but the Body Can

Holy Joe

I Love

The Breakfast Room

I Sing You Old Blues Songs (Before You Get Here)

In the Middle of the Night I Eat Mirrors

I See Her Every Day

A Woman on the Telly Said, If You Just Go Outside, Something Amazing Aways Happens

Wonder Walnut

What Happened?

Her Favourite Suicide

She Thinks She’s Doing It All for Love

Waverley Station

Hitching a Ride

All I Want is the Meaning of Everything

The Second Person

They Say Witches Can’t Cross Water

Island

Sleight of Hand

Fairy Muff

Adventurer of the Year

Submarine Circles

Grains of Sand

Glide to Hades

Collection II: The Dead Queen of Bohemia(first published in 2010)

The Ether’s Scribe

The Bob Conn Experience

For Wang Wei

The First Time I Met My Dad

10 Nicolson Street

The Devil Didn’t Mark You, Those Marks Came from the Man

It’s an I Thing

Old Man Whisker

The Byrons

Squirrels in the Walls

The Snow Holt

Tree House

Fat Isobel

As the Gun Lock Clicks Off

5 a.m.

Chimera

Nine is the Number of the Universe

The Second Time

Absinthe Abattoir

The Bee Hummingbird

The Happening

Fiddler’s Green

The Dead Queen of Bohemia

Collection III: Urchin Belle(first published in 2009)

Glencoe Mizzle

Brooks & the Bishop Moon

In an Old Basque & New Knickers on the Thrown-Away Theatre Chair

In Woods You Wait

The King’s Chamber

After the Sword Years, Mid Pink Gin

Empty September Caravan Rentals

The Sick Kids

Watch — They Get High off This

You Broke Every Knuckle on Lamp-posts on the Hill

The Empty Vase

Gringo’s Whiskers

In My Dream

Councillor

The Other Night; Once Again

Lituya Bay

Babylon

Sedna Be Free

It Should Be Dark, So You Can See

Put a Record On

Even the Last One Left When I Called Time

No Stars Pension in Downtown Cairo

Abstruse

Late Night Visits

Shit Ma Ru

The Pig and the Polis Lights

Epilogue

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Acknowledgements

The Author

Note on the Type

Collection INew Poems

I Wanna Be Your Dog

My son and I

have a dog called Hank

who

one of us

wanted to call Fluffy

but the other

refused to spend ten years in parks

shouting

Fluffy!

unless —

the dog was a Rottweiler,

or a Pit bull.

Hank is just an imprint

of light

in our idle conversations.

Sometimes we see a dog

in the street

and I ask him,

is that what Hank looks like?

It never is

and we like him just like this,

our endless Hank,

a piston on the beach,

jaws snapping at one wave after another

or laid out under my feet

while I read poetry

to strangers

who are no stranger than I —

except for that one

up the back,

and also the woman I meet in the loos

who sings me a song;

then tells me

her dog

overdosed on paint fumes,

and the stain (where he laid tripping

in his last hours)

is still on her carpet.

I don’t ask her why

she let her dog get high on paint fumes.

Or, why she didn’t open a window.

She tells me about a cult;

she’s trying to escape

but they keep peering through her letter box,

shouting

we know

you’re in there!

She says she didn’t realise they were a cult

thought they were just friendly people,

and she was lonely

and had nobody to talk to about Jesus,

or her dead dog

who asphyxiated

watched over by floral vases,

while saints

wept

        the

             hours

                      away.

She was walking home from Norwich market

when she finally realised,

by then she’d given them her money

and dignity,

she’d been lured

and indoctrinated

she said she had to leave

the country

immediately

— to avoid further brainwashing.

I didn’t let her know the brainwashers

have Fiddle-Dee and Fiddle-Dum

in every port and customs

to make sure

those with clear sight

don’t get through

unseen.

She wasn’t really

listening to me read poetry

and we were not in an echoey

toilet with a dripping

cistern . . .

We were on the phone

for the seventeenth time,

because we were trying to swap flats

or I was trying to swap flats

and she was trying to make friends.

She asked if my housing association

would mind

if she had

— seven parrots

— two cats

— a rat

— a budgie

and maybe (if she got over her heartbreak)

another dog.

I said no,

I was sure that would be fine

because I would have said anything — at that point

to get

        out

             of

                Edinburgh.

In the end I didn’t swap houses with crazy-cult-lady

and she’s probably still in the cult

calling strangers,

telling them about her dead dog

even to this day.

Instead, I swapped

flats with a woman in Peckham

who, when I visited to look at her place

had a stack of boxes

in the corner

covered with sheets

and from that part of the room

there was an endless scratching

and I had the idea

of tiny hearts

and lungs beating.

She told me about the council tax band

and the chinese neighbours

and the man out back whose wife threw him out once a month

who was 78

who would spend all day

shouting:

Jean! Jean! Let me back in,

I fought in the war for this country,

let me back into the house, Jean!

I didn’t kiss her, Jean!

I didn’t, let me in!

But Jean would not let him back in

until he’d been out there

for eight hours

and this would happen every three weeks,

all the neighbours would hear it

with our windows

flung wide

open

        to

            summer —

where trees would rustle —

where trees would shake their boughs

to get passers by attention.

Where I would later photograph the harvest moon

in Peckham park

at midnight

and it would turn into a dragon

and I would write a note —

on the back of the photograph

to a writer I admired

saying I wanted to send her a moon

that had turned

into a dragon

and wasn’t it the way of things — moons liked to do that sometimes.

All the while

this woman is talking

and some kind of thing is scratching

and I imagine

what might be under

this huge stack of boxes,

and thin paint-stained sheets.

So, I ask her

what’s in there?

and she tells me

it’s depressed rats,

she yanks the cover off nine crates stacked up to the roof

each filled with rats,

— they’re depressed, she says,

NO FUCKING SHIT! I think.

I rescue depressed rats, she says.

I nod like I understand

and wonder if I can set a few of those rats free

when she’s not looking.

She looks different now she’s showed me the rats

now I know she is the pied piper

of verminous Prozac

playing her

whistle

so rats can smile

again, and can feel connected

to themselves

and each other

and even begin to brush their teeth once more —

think about starting over!

Depressed-rat-lady,

is the one I actually swap flats with and she takes her rats

to live in a room I painted,

in a council estate

block-of-six

where a woman runs around the building

half naked

until police

take her away,

it happens most days,

and every weekend.

So when I’m out walking

with my son

we often see a Hank,

and I imagine him

sharing our life,

our love

I think of a day when Hank

will come with me to readings

or rodeos

or renaissance fairs

and my son says Hank will be a good

friend for our cats,

Milky and Star

who too,

are not

real yet,

because we’re in a rental

with a hostile landlord

who doesn’t like cats.

I’m trying to buy something

but nothing is cheap

and a man called Yassar

keeps snapping up everything,

his purse

is bigger

than my brain,

It’s a conundrum

a logistical puzzle

of how to get somewhere to live

where we can get this dog

and these cats,

I think about it every day.

And when my son and I walk along the river

throwing sticks

looking for the heron

in the highest boughs,

I always tell him yes, yes, yes —

it’s definite.

We will get our Hank one day.

Back in the Caravan (or the Wolf & the Minstrel)

Sometimes I think

the poetry will leave