Baby
So now it's baby time
My friends are egg cups
seed pods
inflated inner tubes
wearing stretchy
growy dresses
And me, barren Auntie,
knitting one, pearling two
in peach and pale blue,
making casings for naked babies
pale as peeled garlic
I will sit on my
wonky springed sofa
and listen to my womb
rattle.
© Sarah Laing
Two deaf women drink coffee and talk
Two women sit in a cafe
heads close together
their hands knead and push the air
talking in space
talking in hands
from their throats emerge
moaning animal noises
grunts and groans
that must buzz in their heads and sound like words in their imaginations
their fingers sing and wrists dive,
eyes drinking in words sculpted.
They speak like children in pain.
They speak like the dance of two birds in flight.
© Helen Lehndorf
Ballroom Dancing
Carlisle Duncan,
whose pale cheeks swell like
an apple cucumber
sits smarmy,
pencil chewing across the
aisle from me.
Carlisle Duncan,
made from agar,
not dust
has no ribs whatsoever;
they were prised from him
while sleeping
to make the perfect
ballroom dancing partner
born with a
sequined spoon in
her mouth
blonde hair pulled so tight
that to unpin it,
her face would fall into a
Charlie Chaplin broken braces gag
Carlisle Duncan
becomes Paul Mercurio
when the scratchy tango plays
Spit shiny shoes
sliding across
spit shiny floor
But by day he
pokes me with his
compass, wipes his
Bogies under his
desk lid, copies my
maths homework
And when he calls Mr
Bell a fuck
wit
His slapped cheek
wobbles like sex
on a water bed.
© Sarah Laing
Small glass jars
I read somewhere
that Frida Kahlo
-fierce, sickly woman that she was-
kept small glass jars
filled with pus
drained from the sores on her back
arranged
along her windowsill
from lightest to darkest green
arranged
so the light shone through them
I imagine them lined up
like cloudy emeralds
I imagine the smile on her face
at having twisted pain into beauty.
© Helen Lehndorf
Crib
Peer through hedge
and my grandmother's
old house
is still the same.
No mouldy toad or
gnome nestled in
parsley and
puha
But still, the same
cracked path,
paua jewelled step
detective glass
paned door
through which
powder-coated granny
would peer,
nose bead poised to
drop
in defiance of her
lace-edged hanky
And in we'd go
enveloped by flesh folds
cigarette smoke
old shawls and
plastic bags
And in we'd go
to lie on candlewick
bedspreads
and stare at glow-in-the-dark
light switches
emitting radiation
to coil in cells,
jack-in-the-box cancer
for years to come
But for now we'd think of
Neil Armstrong and
Thunderbirds
and the puffed-up
wine casks we'd
be issued to surf over
sewerage soiled waves
For now we'd think of
late nights and negroids
and unlimited access to
my grandmother's
chiffon scarves
which, tied end to end
could ring the world twice
Sure, there's an Audi
now parked in the garage
but cracks in the concrete floor
still treasure my grandmother's
leaky VW oil
Sure, there's a new patio,
a conservatory, a silky labrador
but phantom cabbages push
their way through terracotta tiles;
a ghost cat rolls in ghost catnip
steals the tv remote, swallows spare
keys, searches for my grandmother
after midnight in the wicker peg basket
she left behind
Peer through the hedge
and my grandmother's old house
is almost the same
except now the water
coiled inside the sunbaked
garden hose is for
someone else's sandy feet,
not for mine.
© Sarah Laing
To an imaginary grand daughter
Yesterday I stepped out of the house
and was hit by hail stones
I suppose I should have felt
picked on
but in fact I ran laughing down the hill
the hail scattering like spilled marbles around me.
All night I was cold and woke cold, too
my icy feet anchored me in bed far too long
I had to gulp down coffee as the thunder urged around me.
I ran laughing down the hill.
I tell you this
grand-daughter,
although it may seem a small
thing to tell
a strange detail to drop down though years
to post to you, unborn
during the hail storm
after an immense chill night
flashes of lightening across sleeping eyes
a numb body keeping a cold bed cold.
I drank coffee so quickly
the thunder clapped
felt better rested than
when I sleep warm and silent
pulled the stinging air day tight around me
ran laughing down the hill.
© Helen Lehndorf
Base camp
There was hilarity in the camp,
the alcoholics leaned
on bent knees
twisting their bodies in time with the wind;
On Thursday they rise,
bright swooping creatures
superior to all;
San the dog watches
from her truck
she rattles and shakes,
I wish she was mine.
Belched out the door
they come in pairs
with laughter resounding
Ten times louder than the noise I make
when I cower in pink naïvety
scraping away at these words.
© Thérèse Lloyd
Joan Crawford's coat hangers
If Joan Crawford
didn't want her daughter Christina
to hang her white lace frocks
on wire coat hangers,
why did she put them in her closet?
She, a movie star, could have lined it
with diamante studded teak
finished with a hook of pirate panache
But instead, she left the wire ones in there
like a mug of sherry in the hands of a drunk,
a pack of Lucky Strikes in
Humphrey Bogart's pocket.
Why did she whip Christina with
the wire ones, when
if I was her, I wouldn't have even hung
my pretty dresses up?
I would have slump-dumped them
on the floor, leaving skeleton shoulders
to shiver naked in the wardrobe?
Maybe Joan Crawford kept hangers there
in case she locked her keys in the car.
Maybe Christina was lying.
© Sarah Laing
Tadpoles
When she came to stay
she sat on the edge of the bed
with dappled cheeks
and showed me how she could
wrap her ribbons legs
around her neck.
I could see her underpants
of blue forget-me-nots and scalloped lace
to match her ankle socks.
I could see her back-knee birth mark
the shape of a frog's head, and the way
her tendons stretched beneath her skin
like surfacing fish.
When we walked round cowpats
to the deep pond by the pine trees
she boasted that she'd read
all the Narnia books by the time
she was six; and she had
a shell so big that when she pressed
her head inside, her mother's cries
sounded like sailors drowning
in the crashing waves.
As we filled our flesh-toned stocking-nets
with tadpoles the colour of snot
my mother came running across the paddock,
her pink slippers dung-coloured, a
solitary roller sticking to her elbow
like a plastic biddy biddy.
"Lisa, Lisa", she gasped, "you must
go home, there's been a phone callÉ"
So before we got to leave
chocolate wheaten crumbs
between warm midnight sheets
she was gone, on the rattle train,
an Agee jar of tadpoles water-marking her knee
and her dapple-cheeked mother
waiting on the platform,
alone.
© Sarah Laing
The Birds
The crows in Japan have
become so burly
they can take an old lady
out of circulation
They'll strip her of her
shiny teeth, steal her
buttons and zippers
then leave her
dull and pummelled
on the side of the road.
The magpies in New Zealand
swoop down from trees,
claw comb your hair,
quardle oodle
in your ear and
cloister behind pine needle
curtains, plotting how to
pluck out your eyes.
My grandmother,
a fine gardener, a farmer's wife
a gentle woman who only once
broke a hair brush on
my mother's bottom
Grabbed a gun from
beneath the Stag head in the hall
and, eyes squeezed tight,
shot it straight up to
where the magpies wove
Her surprised children gathered
round the offerings
and she told them of
Snow White's blood lips,
alabaster skin, crow black hair
as she buried
the dead birds
beneath the
red rose bush.
© Sarah Laing
trash
Nessie, wrapped in
pink wool and feeding
my fresh-baked shortbread
to the cat
Used to live at the
rubbish dump
Where she made capes from
fat gull feathers and
flounced over white ware icebergs
as the birds rolled their yellow eyes
and screeched titanic warnings
through pincer beaks.
She never sank in the muck,
but paused to lie on flowery sofas,
small feet wedged in smashed doll houses
on her way to her shell-ridged patch
at the centre of it all.
There, she could whip up
a mean dandelion salad and
cook a milk-fed hedgehog
to perfection, prickles peeling off
with the hard-baked clay,
all the while thanking the
housewives who left out
their chipped saucers
that softened the flesh.
There, she could sleep
in her spider web hammock
with teeth unbrushed
as the stars shimmied
indifferent above
Looking at her,
the loose-lidded
scrunch bag of a woman
she's become, you'd
think she'd always lived
amid lavender sachets
Looking at her,
she could be any old woman
drinking her milky tea
out of the saucer.
© Sarah Laing
love ~ people ~ places ~ endings ~ obsessions
