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Incantations
dabolim dabolim flim flam flabolimn
unlike poles attract : like poles repel
zinfandel infidel fandango
the old shoe shuffle of
advance : puncture : withdraw
verse over, versoa
it all begins with a rush :
then (oh!) the ebbing away
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Rounding up 2023, Kathryn's latter-half publications include 'Shark Week', a creative non-fiction piece in issue 68.1 of Westerly and the poem 'Sharom, baby' in issue 27.2 of TEXT. Earlier in the year, 'Birds Don't Care' and 'The Hearth Series' appeared in Issue 2 of #Ranger Magazine.
Many thanks, as always, to editors and co-contributors.
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Buster Keaton Tonight
1.
Aftermath is a good influence,
razing dignity with no
sudden movements to cut
clean down to bone
We love our friends
(& friends of friends)
because they are not our lovers
or blood relations
2.
Tonight we’ve all had a day
that’s left a residue—
survival instinct
is the baddest of bitches
with add-on antidotes
of green & wine
The reshuffled armchairs
now an auditorium row,
saloon door swung closed
for watching the projection
of nothing
The punchline is we're
watching our lives—
we’re all
Buster Keaton tonight
with hooded vaudeville eyes
struck by a funny bone—
we’re whaling
philosophical, with a pure
lack of sentiment.
3.
We set limits we forgot—
pushed to where
we should not have gone
just to feel ourselves
fall in pieces
an education by pattern
not experience.
4.
In Bangalore, sunshine
signals rain—
in Kannada, I will go
means shall I come?
& there is no word for goodbye
in Ngarrindjeri
Mistakes, like songs
are among the items
that never run out.
Rinsed, extinguished
we take to our surfaces
each one harder
than the last
an alternative to everything.
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Reunion
I'm not supposed to drink
on this medicine.
Wasn't meant to have
those two
glasses of wine.
Reading about the possible
outcomes of mixing
is worrying. The wine
was delicious.
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Ms Metaphorical
In the grime of the city, under
the great, startled lark of the city
who are you is less than why
you keep running to the post office.
Rare is the splendour of eyes that see
more than regard. Why don’t you
invite me out with your stylish wife?
The social is supposed to be crunchy:
our gifts consumed like the political
statement of red wine.
Make no plans; eat no fish.
No-one becomes gorgeous
deliberately. We grow into bodies
if fortune: our own, and later
the cartridges of others.
The one intimacy more peculiar
than inspection; than tasting
is being allowed beyond
a stranger’s front door,
feet unrestrained.
Blood seeps out of you like breath.
Your inside odour of honey,
the inflamed plates of your face: all
a rationale for Ms Metaphorical.
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Spent
sober & bored—burrowed & sober
from the space beneath the refrigerator
I swept out the cork from a bottle
we’d emptied a week before
it wouldn’t be out of character to admit
I long—a little. Realistically. Read me deeply
on the margin, far from proximity—
presence & absence—abscess & distance
compressing the rapid change
of a country in kineograph
fractions of shared sleep before the call
to work in solid circumference
a tune someone outside us composes
though the lines in my head stay unsung
what, if anything does, will it matter?
loving & leaving—in repetition
mostly pre-determined, often a matter
of will. The rebel root of a mocking seed
sprouting through the charnel—
the next shared location
where we loosen our preoccupation
with surface & substance
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The Ellipsis and the Saint
Acknowledgments to Thom Sullivan
You’ve left the conversation and nothing remains
but a quiver of solitude.
Sources of warmth are untrustworthy
but your breastplate blushes like the sunrise
from your neckline—
the most reliable piece in your suit of armour.
Isn’t it grisly
to find yourself chained and mailed to the dart line
you never wanted to chase again?
The complicated relationship you bear
isn’t with borders
but with life.
Renounce the heart, that shoddy
sugar cast exploited for Valentine’s.
It has a hammer of contempt;
nails of sentimentality.
You’re not here to consume cups of tea
as if the past didn’t rent holes
in the petit point of your divinity.
The light tread over your words
is identical to the campaign used
to remove your skin; to detach your mind
from the purpose of living with light or gas.
Weary of enthusiasm, watch
as the city shows you
its indifferent face.
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One Offering Per the Hour
Everything is spoiled
and the pages stick together
real gold doesn’t tangle
but a ring of pearl and alloy
can be posted with a single stamp
no confirmation of arrival
we are all nice people here, innit?
still harbouring compassion
in the abstract, leaving it unframed
set against a dead corner in
the white hall of our arriviste
imaginations
the boundaries you hold
until hungry
what I notice most is how few
people stick with you
as if your present is all
that validates
your quick, resentful incarnations
what I notice most here
is how often the average passes
as extraordinary
with enough cash as its filler
it’s hard to have an active sex life
with a domestic labourer in the house
I may seem quiet, akin to dead
I’m not going to bed
I’ve no desire to be sent there
quite yet
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Kar Sang Ahap
If bei mir bist du shoen
means that you’re great
then kar sang ahap
is hazier
surréaliste
honestly
can’t remember a time
when things were pretty
or felt good
do you
mind
do you mind if things
stay the same
or if the painful days
leave
a different sting?
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Goddess, the Mother of All, Protect Me
from other people’s partners
from other people’s children
from other people’s dogs
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Hotel Katy
Whatever it is that you want
it’s unlikely to be found at the door
between the second and third stair—
the blinking button sticks
at a floor you might claim
to have loved more, elevated—
Promise lives there—
not of homely meals, bright lighting
or a full-length settee to couch
every body as firmly as they demand
but of plenty rich and strange
the menu only limited to your
own budget and bag size—
decorated, occasionally sanitised
with a nest that bears my name
and a suitable chair
a bend in the atmosphere so cunning
you have no way of guessing
its next turn—all you have to do
is take or discard
towel, kettle, candle
for your numb senses—
the invocation of any random
godlike thing to protect you
during your stay
linen—clean
pages fanned out into a yawn
and temperate ceiling fan speeds
Come calling
make the journey
and you’ll never be denied—
anything you need
is not everything on offer
but there is strength in the welcome—
the hostess mimicry began
at a young age—
a skeleton still remains
and enough space to dream
you could do anything—
even beyond
the rich, the strange
Wind down like a music box
until your melody plays
in retrograde, until your
boundaries can be traced—
the journey back is nothing
compared to the comfort
on your inside and the rate,
it’s always fair—
(what it offered—what it gave
how it was used, used up
and betrayed)
put your hand to the door
knock again—
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Delicate (ante meridiem)
Follicles of want have taken to every surface,
clinging to the curtains, wax-white
with their phantom mildew
to the solitary houseplant
catching raindrops weeping
through the ceiling
a slow torture by fresh water
your attar on my bedsheets
accidental grazes on my ankles
still healing; of our hands
and this possibility
My admission to the sober walls of morning
settles into a boundary
sordid and destructive, outside,
in the surfacing light:
perhaps
I don’t want you to be kind
I want you to be particular
Here comes another
Friday-Saturday-Sunday
of distracting reality
every evening, an attempt
every result, a misfit
corrupting my memory
the enduring, exultant seed
deep within the dense soil
companion bats shriek over
as I enact the contained glimpses;
your proximity
razing my scalp like daybreak
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Bliss, 43
For Gabrielle
Ritual sets us onto ourselves
gellid in procrastination
replacing not fulfilling
definitions
the empty cartridges
of a bulleted list
that neither sees
nor hears
our instinct
for preservation
killing’s simply the opiate
everyone is doing
like the long hems
and long hair
a prescribed pastiche
of femininity
here we are finding instant news
with the help of convention and gin
embracing distance
has skeletal comfort
though its bones are the bones
of our kindred
a long silver of hair
clinging to a dress worn there
I am weakened without
your brazen spine
bracing us
both
somehow, grizzling, ‘home’
while you lie sleeping in yours
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Vive la Revolution
My old friends
all shut the fuck up
& got married
in the end.
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Afternoon Departure
There's a clown
in every town --
more
fool
me
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The Breakable Woman
In one version, the battle
over my body has ended
with another’s covert strike
and its pyrotechnic reaction.
My head severed sharply
by a sword of Saint-Omer:
limbs no more members
of the same tight society:
voice-box taped and shelved
its tiny silver key sent poste restante
to a strangulated exclave.
In this version, my dissolution
is slow and particular: ligament
to cartilage, a rising tide.
Desperately I want to keep
hold of myself: to return to you all
after this prolonged unmooring,
imposed by the inky current,
counter to my choice.
What remains are my words
to the wine seller:
I’m nostalgic for the taste of my country
to the circling necrophiliacs:
I am laid out to your fancy
the person who forgot
I am a person
is gone.
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Adore Me Mañana
After Wislawa Szymborska
Gin in the rain.
Consumption without creation.
Mythologies so often repeated
I’m tempted to apply them as truth.
Except for when I’m not.
I’m emphatic.
I only know the last dream
I remembered was true-to-life.
No embellishment but all the same, no deterrent.
Like bad weather on Saturday;
the onionskin extravagance of luck;
setting my face up close to a friend’s grief,
that misted pane of glass, to see the interior clearly
or at least, less obscured. Elsewhere my consciousness
flickers over the vacuous vessels that came after and before;
the remembrance of those seeking and emptily sought.
At times we regret and prolong regret,
since pain can move us more than the anodyne
line of days, more than our dishonest selves
forestalling not only arrival but also journey.
If only it didn’t take all this time and syntax
for humour to pigment what struck me, then, as tragic.
Yet the intersections of purgatory, civil as twilight,
repeat endlessly
(I’ve a fine figure for loving
at any weight, but conversations prove Byzantine.)
Too often we engage in the onslaught of ambiguity.
Meaninglessness without definition.
I’m standing outside the cell and can see how fixed the bars.
Openness is a form of stasis,
deftly added to life’s numbing agents of gelid sea water,
wine and desire; writing within constraint.
I find myself weary of intellectual instruction.
Address me instead with profound nonsense;
I’d be more than glad to hear.
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