Sophie Mayer: Three Poems

Sophie Mayer

Sophie Mayer is a writer and educator. She studied and taught English literature and film studies in Cambridge and Toronto, and taken part of the poetry performance and publication scenes in both of those cities, as well as in London, where she now lives. She is a Commissioning Editor for queer literary journal Chroma and one of the “new lyric poets” included in Andy Brown’s anthology The Allotment. She blogs about literature for the English PEN Online Atlas, where she is a moderator, as well as writing regularly for Sight & Sound, Little White Lies and Vertigo about film, and for The F-Word, Venuszine and Shebytches about women and culture. She is the co-editor of There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond and the author of The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love. Her second collection of poetry, Her Various Scalpels, is forthcoming from Shearsman.

Tendered Buttons/The Button Tenders: A Queer Utopia

1. Menstruation

They’d heard the jokes, the boasts, for years. But the morning that it happened. The headlines. Quarter of all adult males globally. Shedding zygotes epiphytically. Like an episode of Doctor Who. Polyclinics couldn’t cope: men seeping, weeping, swaddling their cocks in tea towels. For the moment.

It only took a week for the products to appear. Untaxed. Must-have. Free with this month’s GQ. What took longer: to realise how the balance had shifted (our stains the same). How the shared ebb drew us together. Drew the moon that little bit closer.

2. Fat

Turned out we were better at it: zero-g. It’s something you learn inside the skin, how to float, how to conjure grace against all obstacles. How to be outshone and keep — deftly — moving.

They had to make the suits roomier, but then there was no stopping us: connoisseurs of space — expansive not expansionist — we revelled in the neverending, our earths of flesh admitting no attrition.

We call ourselves full, after our sister the moon: whom we see without shadow.

3. Birth

Brought forth by gravity, my first breath was earth: Earth’s earth, crated and shipped for experimental cultivation. And what grew — what I grew into. This revolution. Not quite what the lab coats intended.

From this mound, snake-shaped of loamy handfuls grasped by squatting women. They say that’s how River Woman shaped us: fisted, thumbing, a finger prised between our legs to let her in.

And out. I’ve never seen a river but remember. Like soil — blood-rusted — caught under nails: what it is to emerge. The onrush, rushing into space.