Hallelujah for 50ft Women Read online

  his ceaseless weep of blood,

  the women cannot enter

  if they bleed –

  an old law.

  As the bridal couple glides

  down the aisle,

  her white veil twitching,

  I feel my pains.

  A woman

  bleeding in church,

  I pray for time,

  for slow motion.

  Unprotected, I bleed,

  I have no bandage,

  my ache finds no relief.

  My thorns

  are high heels

  and itchy stockings.

  He, the imitator, bleeds on

  in numb eternal effigy,

  his lugubrious journey of martyrdom

  rewarded with worship.

  Tonight custom demands more blood:

  sheets must be stained

  with the crimson flowers

  of a bride’s ruptured garden.

  Her martyrdom

  will be silent knowledge

  suffered in solitude.

  As we leave the house

  of the male bleeder,

  I feel myself wet and seeping,

  a shameful besmircher of this ceremony

  of white linen

  and creamy-petalled roses;

  yet underneath our skirts

  we are all bleeding,

  silent and in pain,

  we, the original

  shedders of ourselves,

  leak the guilt of knowledge

  of the surfeit

  of our embarrassing fertility

  and power.

  KATIE DONOVAN

  Clear Cut

  In America, this wilderness

  where the axe echoes with a lonely sound

  LOUIS SIMPSON

  I blame it on our forefathers

  who sweated and sawed,

  stripped bare the beast until nothing

  stood between them

  and what they claimed as theirs.

  Hills left to scab healed

  into cities which raised sons

  who satisfied themselves trimming hedges,

  pulling weeds, mowing lawns;

  sons who found fearsome

  the thicket at the slope of our bellies

  and decided it was our turn to cut.

  KRIS JOHNSON

  What Do Women Want?

  I want a red dress.

  I want it flimsy and cheap,

  I want it too tight, I want to wear it

  until someone tears it off me.

  I want it sleeveless and backless,

  this dress, so no one has to guess

  what’s underneath. I want to walk down

  the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store

  with all those keys glittering in the window,

  past Mr and Mrs Wong selling day-old

  donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers

  slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,

  hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.

  I want to walk like I’m the only

  woman on earth and I can have my pick.

  I want that red dress bad.

  I want it to confirm

  your worst fears about me,

  to show you how little I care about you

  or anything except what

  I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment

  from its hanger like I’m choosing a body

  to carry me into this world, through

  the birth-cries and love-cries too,

  and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,

  it’ll be the goddamned

  dress they bury me in.

  KIM ADDONIZIO

  The Ugly Daughter

  knows loss intimately,

  carries whole cities in her belly.

  As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.

  She was splintered wood and seawater.

  They said she reminded them of the war.

  On her fifteenth birthday you taught her

  how to tie her hair like rope

  and smoke it over burning frankincense.

  You made her gargle rosewater

  and while she coughed, said

  Macaanto girls shouldn’t smell

  of lonely or empty.

  You’re her mother.

  Why did you not warn her?

  Hold her, tell her that men will not love her

  if she is covered in continents,

  if her teeth are small colonies,

  if her stomach is an island,

  if her thighs are borders?

  What man wants to lie down

  and watch the world burn

  in his bedroom?

  Your daughter’s face is a small riot,

  her hands are a civil war,

  a refugee camp behind each ear,

  a body littered with ugly things

  but God,

  doesn’t she wear

  the world well.

  WARSAN SHIRE

  Biosphere

  You’ll leave the crowded carriage on the train

  sucking in all the humanness in your belly

  until the dress falls straight down across

  your waist, untouched by imperfections.

  Your calves built to outrun the unsightly

  reflections in shop windows, hair tousled,

  catching its breath on your shoulders

  because your look has long been

  ‘trying too hard to look like you

  haven’t tried very hard’.

  You are perfumed with

  dry, anxious breaths that keep

  you only one gasp away breathing in

  so much you disappear.

  But I wish you would wear yourself like a rainforest.

  I want the stubbly bark textures on your legs,

  standing end to end,

  sweet like cinnamon woodwork.

  Your breath humid with songs

  you left in your gut because breathing

  wasn’t fashionable.

  The leaves caught in your teeth

  like sunlight streaming in.

  I’m sure when rainforests breathe,

  everything else moves so they can be still.

  I want to unravel the guilt pressing your

  legs together until you take up the empty spaces

  you are too scared to interrupt.

  Do not touch your body with bad intentions.

  Do not pinch the parts spilling out of

  your shirt, or knead the skin

  like dough between fingers until it grows

  red from rejection. Do not cook it under

  the sun because skin was designed to

  be loved by warm hands, and not fire.

  The hills, road markings, earth and spice

  trails on your thriving ecosystem are

  sitting under your nailbeds.

  They will remind you that

  nature has wanted soft mud for your growth,

  not steel clippers peeling you back to the root.

  Rub your full stomach because you don’t have a beard

  to twiddle between your fingers.

  It is filled with wisdom.

  SUNAYANA BHARGAVA

  A Clearing

  When my eldest son died last week

  I ate –

  started picking pieces of plasterboard

  drilled my tongue into the cavity

  wound fibreglass floss round and round.

  I ground up breezeblock and brick –

  licked every crumb –

  chewed tables and chairs,

  spat splinters.

  In a cascade of foam,

  I devoured the sofa –

  all its flabby trampolinings,

  sick bouts and Sunday snoozes.

  I bit the taps off radiators,

  gargled at their fountains.

  Still thirsty,

>   I drained and buckled the tank.

  Chipping the enamel off the bath gave me a jolt,

  Taste of iron returning to my blood,

  prickled attraction and repulsion of mild steel

  with the pins and plates bracing me, patching me

  from times I was knocked down and smashed.

  At 5.30, I quaffed the pilot light like a happy hour cocktail,

  knew I must go deeper.

  On my hands and knees I scratched aside tiles, slabs,

  tasted oxides, alloys, amalgams –

  I must excavate the gas main,

  unleash the blue-hungry flames that snarl from the oven mouth.

  CHRIS KINSEY

  Pomegranates

  (for Lady Macbeth)

  I wish that children came

  easy as a lie.

  That blood came, dropped like

  so many seeds –

  thoughtlessly. It’s as if

  someone has sewn me up.

  So I took the handle of a knife

  and split a slit.

  Finally blood, for all the

  months I missed.

  Imagined: a pomegranate

  spilling red-bruised-black

  imagined a girl her flesh

  was blue and sad

  imagined a boy his hair

  was black like mine

  imagined myself stretched

  scream-open and alive.

  It took five hours to

  stitch me up.

  They left my hands red,

  so as not to forget.

  KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE

  Miscarriage, Midwinter

  For weeks we’ve been promising

  snow. You have in mind

  thick flakes and a thick white sky;

  you are longing to roll up

  a snowman, to give him a hat

  and a pebbly smile. We have ice

  and I’ve shown you, under

  the lid of the rainwater barrel, a single

  spine forming, crystals pricked

  to the delicate shape of a fir, but

  what can I say to these hard

  desolate flakes, dusting our path

  like an industrial disaster?

  It’s dark, but I’m trying to scrape

  some together, to mould just

  the head of the world’s smallest

  snowman, but it’s too cold and

  it powders like ash in my hand.

  KATE CLANCHY

  Churched

  My aunties were churched.

  Gravelly-voiced women

  with low-cut necks

  and wide-brimmed hats

  and hands that kneaded dough

  and slapped it in its place.

  ‘I’ll not be churched again,’ she said,

  me aunty Nora,

  sitting there in her frock

  of brazen red.

  Six children did she bear –

  ‘Sure what’s a little wear and tear

  for a woman like yourself.’

  Two others did she lose,

  one was handicapped.

  Still is.

  ‘Wombs and breasts and leaking milk, quick

  pass us the surplice made of silk’ –

  That’s what she swore

  she heard them say,

  the clerics

  when they began to pray.

  ‘I’ll not be churched again,’ she said,

  ‘and bow and scrape

  and bend my head.’

  ‘Sure what in heaven’s name

  would they know

  of mornings retching o’er the sink,

  of the giving up of the booze,

  the fags, the drink.

  Of the giving up and the giving

  In and the hormones

  raging through me

  like an ocean

  full of sin.’

  ‘I’ll not be churched again,’ she said,

  ‘and bow and scrape

  and bend my head.’

  ‘Sure what in heaven’s name

  could they know

  of the life growing

  in my womb,

  how it moves

  and turns, swimming,

  in a dark galaxy

  of its own,

  and how I nightly roam

  the barren landscape

  of the moon,

  then I’m throwing up again

  at noon.’

  ‘I’ll not be churched again,’ she said,

  ‘and bow and scrape

  and bend my head.’

  ‘Sure what on earth

  could they know

  of bringing forth

  a child; of the moaning

  swelling, growing wild,

  of the burning opening

  wide and free

  and my waters breaking

  like the sea.’

  ‘I’ll not be churched again,’ she said,

  me aunty Nora,

  sitting there in her frock

  of brazen red.

  ‘I’d rather go to an early tomb

  than let them curse

  my blessed womb.’

  SIOBHÁN MAC MAHON

  Churching was a religious ceremony, performed by the Catholic Church, on women, following their giving birth – a sort of cleansing.

  The only body I have

  I’ve:

  Loved with it.

  Told lies with it.

  Ate too many mince pies with it.

  Dressed it in some questionable clothes over the years.

  Poisoned it with drugs.

  Filled it balloon like with fears.

  Cut it. Bitten it. Watched bits of it sag.

  Walked it. Scolded it. Taught it how to nag.

  Spent hours looking in the mirror criticising.

  Different parts of it every year despising.

  Yoga’d it. Toga’d it.

  Made it run when it wanted its bed.

  Put it through aerobics until every part was red.

  Broken little bits of it on several occasions.

  Blamed the flabby bits of it for struggling relations.

  Called it too short.

  Let it be bought.

  Sold it down the river.

  Taken vodka to extremes without warning my liver.

  Dyed its hair. Painted its eyes.

  Tried every product possible in efforts to disguise.

  Dehydrated it. Berated it.

  Burnt it in the sun.

  Sat on it. Picked it.

  Prayed I’d get a better one.

  Tired it. Squashed it.

  Failed to de-freckle with lemon bleach.

  Scratched it. Starved it,

  to be weights always just out of reach.

  Bitched about it in its company.

  Hated it with all my heart.

  But now that it don’t work no more

  I wish I could go back to the start.

  ELOISE WILLIAMS

  Chocolate

  She crams it down her throat

  like a murderess,

  alone at last,

  alternately kissing and throttling.

  SELIMA HILL

  Does My Bum Look Big in This?

  Women, beware, for the war is not won;

  We’re out of our kitchens, no longer Anon,

  We run countries and councils, households and firms,

  Budgets and hedge funds, all on our own terms.

  We broadcast, direct, write, publish, teach

  And yet liberation remains out of reach;

  For still the enlightened glitterati will hiss

  ‘Can you tell me, does my bum look big in this?’

  Celebrity culture is not helping our cause,

  With beauty defined by the size of our drawers.

  Breasts like bazookas, teeth bleached to fluorescence,

  We’re expected to stay in endless adolescence.

  No
wonder our faces look shocked and aghast,

  Our looks are what matter and our bottoms are vast.

  I’ll bet the day of the wedding, Pippa asked her big sis

  ‘Be honest, does my bum look big in this?’

  So ladies watch out, if you value your lives,

  You’re right to be more than just mothers and wives.

  If you’re fifty and flabby and dress like a slob,

  Book in with your surgeon or risk losing your job.

  Your degree, your gold medal are not worth a jot

  When the circle of shame zooms in on that bot.

  When you look in the mirror, remember Ignorance is bliss

  And don’t ask ‘Does my bum look big in this?’

  PATRICIA ACE

  Invitation

  1

  If my fat

  was too much for me

  I would have told you

  I would have lost a stone

  or two

  I would have gone jogging

  even when it was fogging

  I would have weighed in

  sitting the bathroom scale

  with my tail tucked in

  I would have dieted

  more care than a diabetic

  But as it is

  I’m feeling fine