This Fruiting Body E-Book

Caleb Parkin

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 48

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Caleb Parkin's debut poetry collection, This Fruiting Body, plunges us into octopus raves and Sega Megadrive oceans, in the company of Saab hermit crabs and ASDA pride gnomes. It's a playful invitation to a queer ecopoetics that permeates our bodies and speech, our gardens, homes, and city suburbs. It reintroduces us to a Nature we've dragged up until it's unrecognisable. Parkin's perceptive poetry sparks with neon visuals, engaged in the joyful, urgent, imagining of alternative realities and new futures. How might we relate queerly and dearly to our environment and its shared conundrums? These adventurous poems delight in human and nonhuman intimacies, teem with life, ponder bug sex and put masculinities under the microscope. This Fruiting Body roves our grandiloquent planet, embracing our kinships with matter, culture, creatures and drag-mother Earth herself.

Leseprobe

This Fruiting Body

This Fruiting Body

Caleb Parkin

ISBN: 978-1-913437-25-1

eISBN: 978-1-913437-26-8

Copyright © Caleb Parkin, 2021.

Cover artwork: ‘This Fruiting Body’ © Jasmine Ward

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Caleb Parkin has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published October 2021 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

For all my families

Contents

Young Animal

If the Earth is My Mother

garden

Dear Horticultural Mother-in-law,

The Radio Talks About GDP

How to Preserve a Fatberg

All the chipshops I have ever been to

i swallow

Voice Over: The Carrier Bag

By the Writing Shed at Laugharne

The Zone

Ecco the Dolphin

Great-Great-Grandspider, 2120

Terms of Service: Your Fruiting Body

Ode on a Black Plastic Compost Bin

Tomb Sweeping Day

Winged Insects at Literary Events

Exit Only

Hopper Swiss Collects Waterfalls

from The Mar-a-Lago Resort Website

The Channel

Chromatophores

Minotaur at the Soft Play Centre

I Compare Myself to a GIF of a Dung Beetle

Campers

Watership Down Fugue

The Painted Gate

Eight Kinds of Love

Doghouse

For I Will Consider Gnorma, the Asda Pride Gnome

Doctored-ness

Spiral Shell

Unknown Distance, Moderate Difficulty

Hermit Crab

At the Outdoors Store

The Ballad of the Morris Omies

Witches’ Knickers

Shrinking Violets

Tree Triptych

Stubble

Kind Words About Darkness

Instead of Smoking After Sex

Somewhere to Keep the Rain

After the Section 14

Oberon Avenue

Please Do Not Touch the Walrus or Sit on the Iceberg

Acknowledgements and Notes

Thanks

About the author and this book

“…in the face of self-doubt, ridicule, and broader ecological crisis, we embrace our sense of our own absurdity, our uncertainty, our humor, even our perversity.”

– Nicole Seymour, Toward an Irreverent Ecocriticism

“If anything, life is catastrophic, monstrous, nonholistic, and dislocated, not organic, coherent, or authoritative.”

– Timothy Morton, Queer Ecology

“There will be no tidying up, dear.”

– Mrs Madrigal, in The Days of Anna Madrigalby Armistead Maupin

Young Animal

Horniman Museum, Summer 2019

A greyhound’s head, its paper-thin fur now even

thinner, wall-mounted next to a bulldog’s jowl, now

static, unwobbly, and a squish-jawed (fixed) Pekingese.

The central wolf’s muzzle is staged in a jaded snarl.

These dogends fan out in a ruff around this Ancient,

the great Mother, bearing all dog breeds as a crown;

their bare and shroud-skinned skulls a halo in bone,

relics of curated evolution. Before them, a little girl

weeps – just a pup. I’m here only with this notebook

and then notice her mum, exchange empathetic looks.

I move on, suddenly eye-height with Hylobates moloch

from Java’s scorched edges. Suspended, the simian knots

of its fingers still yearn for branches. Young Animal.

Its gawky limbs stretch, seek the warmth and bristle

of an elder for piggybacks – to safety, the upper mantle,

and the budding tips of leaves. Now, slight and skeletal

cousin: rise from the wall, through that glass, as if

to shatter all this history. Here: I offer you my back.

If the Earth is My Mother

then the Earth yodels in carparks and stairwells. She tells endless tales

over morning tea leaves, while she gossips in customary understories.

If the Earth is my mother, she’s a composer of gin and free-poured song,

a knitter of waste-wool, a forager of material, a seamstress of the surplus.

The Earth is a feeder: baker of suet islands on bubbling oceans of stew –

cook for several hundred million imagined diners. A wearer of outlandish wigs.

When Earth doesn’t call, that’s the worry; she gives too much away in her silences.

If the Earth is my mother, she’s had IVs and pipelines fitted, right to her heart.

Earth has evolved, changed landscape. She finds it hard to rest,

even after a long and chemical winter, a malignant aftermath.

She knows her own and her neighbours’ maladies, her own and others’ offspring.

Earth will mother you all, if you’ll let her (or even if you won’t). If the Earth is

any kind of step-, -in-law, drag, foster, second, adoptive, convoluted, maddening mother

to you, then it’s time you called her – right now – so she can let you know    it’s serious.

garden is a dull green square edged with earth   so we reform its boundaries revise its curves rework the turf uncover  the bottle-top static of plastic  the crisp packet shrapnel  then this pipe packed with soil   which we pull at   which keeps going   have you ever had a long hair stuck down your throat   half in half out the body   the way you can feel the length of the oesophagus   we pull the pipe   keep pulling   and it unravels somewhere under the redrawn map of this garden   coiled under there   an unkillable snake   have you ever had a piece of spaghetti stuck down your throathalf food half rope   and the pipe keeps coming   fills up the new round lawn   twists into an elaborate roller coaster of white ribbed plastic stuffed with clay  the strata to the gut of the planet   the pipe keeps untangling have you ever had a thread stuck down your throatas though your body was cotton and you were   unravelling