my baby moves purple across the page

makes strange knotlands ink trees

forms yet to form

I want to say scribbles –

I say: “that’s good, darling”

meting out discernments

teaching him how to straighten

against us both

after all, it’s not like we represent first

as if there’s this world of objects

there is no world

there are no objects

we used to shape lands in the back of the car

we’d hold our pens to the page

and the road would tell us

where we were going

what was it that we wanted to render?

Sartre’s standing in front of the trees

watching them melt

they’re too tired to die

pen in his hand, my baby says

let me write your poem for you

this is how it’s done:

i need you like i need roots and words

though i’m scared where they go

those bone gnarls

also in my ankle when it snapped

all this dark writing came up through the skin

but all i could read was i’m falling, i’m falling, i’m falling

they used to call the wrist the ankle of the hand

they used to say a sprain was the same

as an expression, they used to say

an ankle was an angle.

When it’s cold i feel my angles.

When it’s cold i feel where you came in.

It’s cold today

and my baby moves purple across the page

makes knotlands, ink bones, forms yet to form.

step into this clearing  

                                    circle of grass, ash, elm, oak

undetermined shrubs in the back

something ungrown around a hole

step into this clearing

                                    a protest gathering yes

a friend is on her way to lunch – no she’s not joining

look up the hill as you talk

                                                                        (but i thought you were a midwife)

step into this clearing

                                    helpful, the sun stretches over the hole

where land becomes terrain

step into this clearing

            get your fingers in

white phosphorus in your algae bloom

white phosphorus in your lipid layers

white phosphorus in your agricultural body

white phosphorus in your conference paper

                                                                        (remember when the phrase was absent present

                                                                        remember when the phrase was always already

                                                                        remember the affective turn)

step into this clearing

                                    so what if when i come now I see hospitals on fire

                        so what if when I come now i see lightning from below

step into this clearing

                        god, i feel dry

composite of ash, lead, barium, antimony

(you can’t take it in)

terraforming to my knees

step into this clearing

                                    see “the photographed void”  

(i want you to make some sense inside me)

tell me your “ontotheological concerns”

                                    drink these “oversaturated referents of ruin”

step into this clearing

                        they re-opened the Plough down the road from us

it’s now called The New Plough

step into this clearing

                        when my parents divorced, they couldn’t sell the house

so they made an internal entrance to next door

and my dad moved in there / i could hear him at night

step into this clearing

                        i used to stand dizzy on the step between

listening to sounds from both sides

                        (what did the room do when lucy stepped through the wardrobe)

step into this clearing

            love, we’re framing it as if it’s already over

                                                                                    (what does the soil retain)

but before the clearing, they’re tying their hands

the sun is stretching over the hole

and they’re stepping in.

DescriptioBad girlfriend

Bad girlfriend melts your rented

bedroom window. Only comes

when you don’t.

Hurts Christmas,

September,

& Patti Smith.

Calls you a cripple

in Brixton.

Bad girlfriend puts scare quotes

on “relationship”,

like a crap Prince Charles,

on a Home Counties stile.

Invites you for meals

that you cook.

Makes you read her angel cards

to see who’s next.

She drinks the tears of Palestinians.

Pauses fghts to correct

possessive apostrophes.

In bed,

she whispers all the things

she won’t do to you.

Asks if you want a happy birthday

then dumps you in a Marilyn voice.

Bad girlfriend swaps your Sertraline

for water tablets, your water tablets

for Citalopram, your Citalopram

for Yasmin. She wants you to read

Jordan Peterson to her,

in the bath,

wearing a bubble beard,

as foreplay.

Ruth Charnock

5 Y M | I S

Bad girlfriend weaves complex allegories

where you always play the role

of a large ugly fsh

destroying the precious coral

which she prefaces with this

is just a metaphor but

I am the precious coral.

You start to fnd cartoons

of misshapen whales in your sex drawer.

Bad girlfriend wants you to get

a labia piercing & cries

when you remind her

that you don’t have labia.

The next day,

you fnd a piece of paper

with the heading

‘words that rhyme with labia’

across the top. There are two little lips

with faces on them

& one of them is weeping.

grenade

that year I lost the empress card three times:

once, following a conversation about pleasure

in a decommissioned graveyard, 

then when my mother

named my father’s campness in the seventies

as the cause for the lithium

he took in handfuls by the three-bar fire

then on the earthstrip behind our house

some time after lobbing

the porcelain cottage against the back wall –

***

that same week, I sat in front of my childhood

in a morning heatwave 

with a pomegranate splayed on a cardtable, 

posing for something, 

as his toddler legs got sticky in the sun.

The photographer said, then,

(as she hard bent me to the left)

we can’t all be Persephone, juicily

imminent in the life-death-life cycle –

sometimes, you just have to teeth

and tits it whilst we light

you from behind.

Turn your gash face up.

***

I had left the seeds

as semaphores to the underworld

in all sorts of places; 

waiting hearts next to bromides

by American queer theorists

writing on cruising sites 

closed down by Giuliani in the 90s;

tears in our park’s tarmac

where I fingered in lines from your books.

Once, I pushed the empress

through your front door, her hand

on the safety pin: pith

on her tongue, as a dare –

***

you didn’t take it. Instead, said

you weren’t a grenade, glancing away

from something meant to shatter. 

I pushed it, I said I missed you

before you were here, I said

I was built for explosion, I said

I wanted this kind of wanting. I said

I can be a pomegranate, or am already.

Now, we bend to maps, horizons 

of different sublet rules and visa timings, 

coffees we don’t have here

cheaper and better coffees. Kinder land.

You explain separability,  all the ways we disperse 

to know our wholeness. I open a Google Drive 

titled ‘portals’ that I forget to populate, 

though it seems important to know 

what will go on in there, as the red wet 

runs down my knuckles, into all the folds 

of where you’re going.

a knot.

right scapula gristle one third down

i push my back against spiky ball metal stick lovers’ hands heat pads my own musculature the wall

nothing helps 

i wonder as to its provenance

lumpy pillow didn’t stretch enough hypermobile

this morning’s argument about domestic balance

you told me not to slam the door so hard

because the house would move 

imagine the place just before the knot comes

(muscles threading towards each other; 

it’s going to be a big one)

& you can see: yes that shoulder lifts every time i sit to write or

yes that tightness there is my brother’s voice on 9th July, 1984 or

yes i am ill-suited to this incarnation; this version of world yes

i am twisting in this work of my life the pram

the dishwasher the jam-lid the friend the phone the baby all wanting that i please them 

my fascia the last or first site of resistance 

  bend gently now to your lover’s back, remembering

that grief lives three fingers down from their shoulder 

left side, two palms in.

work them pink there. don’t worry

if you see cereal boxes on a breakfast bar, 

someone lowering to sit, then reaching across 

with their non-dominant hand. don’t worry if you see America.

only follow each frictive click of tendon on tendon

like stools pushed back on a kitchen floor. 

we will all need to learn these moves (try not to slouch)

where to tie; where to loosen; where to soothe. 

bend now (rub in chamomile, ginger, bromelain). 

& don’t give me that sensory motor amnesia

about our shapes have forgotten: they know.

our fibres are going to tear and tear 

before we learn what they can no longer bear.