Sideshow History

Tattooed Lady

they can see all the body
they want from the rope

or scribble with pens
for a few shillings more

I've drawn enough scars
across cartoon wrists

enough arrows through
wire-trapped hearts

each needle-prick day
catwalk-thin, grin-stripped

I flaunt my skin
and stare back at you

lost, there in the mouldy
shade; like the snake

I've inked into my breast
I'm coiled inside cold veins —

you are mesmerised
by the lines of fame

but inside this net of fantasy
there is only pain

Sideshow History

Vanessa the Undresser

about calculus —
the infinitesimal difference

between bodies —
smooth chins, pointed noses

bearded women, hairless
as the mountains;

about calculus —
the infinitesimal difference

between species: the word field
meaning all the horses

in the steeple chase
their rippling mouths

their foam, the stamp of their breath
in the ice-lit mornings

their rustic Bergamask
when set loose in the mushrooms

about gender —
the weight of a breast in a cup

strange how it eases-
but I look at them, the horses, their toss-

and-dance at odds with hunger
their hooves-and-clomp, their lips’ dark prunes

their rustic Bergamask
when set loose in the mushrooms

from Colombine

XI … first

Pierrot brought me a gift
wrapped in hessian —
a Chinese bowl painted
by a bamboo nib.

Five dragons claw for a pearl
between cloud and flame
and, below,
is a brush-dark sea
and a tea-house near my cheek
when I drink.

I imagine the an-hua
or secret flower
that he says hides in porcelain,
tossed somewhere
between driftwood
and the blossoming peach.
It is the sweet taste.

And a crack from base to tip,
like the fossil of a storm,
leaks milk in the mornings
and wine before sleep.

What holding hands
has the bowl forgotten?

It arrived
unflinchingly,
glazed by my lover's look.

Long-tailed birds
wash their feathers against
its celadon hip

and because I've had nothing
given so freely before this,
nothing so blemished
or so fresh from the lands of silk,

I am sunk
into the drowned flower
of its sex,
hurt by the crack,
licked by the lip, the rim — copper-bound.

XII … the rim, copper-bound

I've not forgotten
how the child slid from my body
not child as ‘other’
but as the child of my centre.

I've not forgotten the shit and vomit
the difficult milk,
the bruise of a mouth
on my nipple.

I've not forgotten nights
of sleepless hunger
and the breaking spray
of carnivorous flowers
rising to her cry
— her body pale as a morning moon
against mine
and, in her breath,
the imagined, scattered noises of the sea …

I’ve not forgotten
that her name, Genevieve,
‘white wave’
sucked me into an ocean
of salt and dominical weed
where I swim like an imperfect fish
in her greater shadow.