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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781909844001 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Parthian Books |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 90 |
| File size: | 186 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Shape of a Forest
By Jemma L King, Kathryn Gray
Parthian
Copyright © 2012 Jemma L KingAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-909844-00-1
CHAPTER 1
Amelia Earhart
In 2010, a team of researchers from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery discovered the remains of a 1930s female American castaway on the remote and uninhabited island of Nikumaroro in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is strongly believed that the castaway was Amelia Earhart, the pioneering female pilot who disappeared in 1937 whilst attempting to circumnavigate the world by air.
i
For someone so accustomed to speed,
silence and stillness was something.
It fell to a hum.
It widened.
First, an inventory of quiet invaded and took root.
Each variety lived
and sang one note.
But this shelf fell off, deeply,
plaintively cut to the igneous core.
The air plucked at bird string,
marsupial chatter, and
tapped irregular fingers to it.
Each scrambled song an insult
to one who craved an engine and a wing.
At first, she went mad.
ii
The damning thing was
the finger bone. Hers, they said.
That and the pre-war American cosmetics. Misplaced
in a land without a metal press or edges,
nature powdered to a pigment,
or hands to press the buttons.
That, and the upturned oyster shells,
shallow buckets laid out in rows
to plug up the sand,
drain the sky, resist
the wretched equatorial
heat.
The desperation that brands the spot
where the star imploded
in the most sparse
edge of the galaxy. Unnoticed
surrounded by star birds and star crabs
caught in the gravity
of their own orbits.
iii
The crabs ate her,
crushing the bones that
once hung bravery,
eyes that held the earth's curve,
the heart that burst adrenaline
drilled it to the tips of grasping fingers
feeling life, even in the face of the spiked sea.
Electra's crunch and spasm groaning.
The sea church settles
and takes pity.
iv
Amelia fell upwards and
was laid like a pearl on the shoreline.
v
I imagine her whole and tanned,
her clothing dirtied but intact.
Her right hand loosely on her hip,
the other shielding squinting eyes
from sun which levels her up.
She looks out before looking in
to the mountain tip of her new island,
the horizon as empty as the stomach.
Birthdays pass, Christmases pass.
The slow collapse
into new years.
She's stood there, blinking.
Water Music
The stream is coughing notes
up on the rocks,
frothing them out
and hissing
trails of bubbles,
a troop of dancers;
racing stone edges towards the
width and drop ahead.
Full rain
pitches her lungs,
splits them on flint islands,
bursts on the gravity
of the fall's edge.
Unbound by physics,
she collapses into
white myth.
Down the river, a quieter affair,
dull percussive chords.
Irregular salmon vault and
side slap
the calm on descent,
clawed back
by the estuary
in aubade, singing
to her sons of the sea,
calling them home.
Nuclear
Here all of us are
crackling anxious
to love.
But there is an alchemist
wanting for myth
to buy his way in,
with his strangler's
verve and bargain.
The air is tattooed
with a pulse.
Something lives
beyond the body.
A shattered blissbox.
The thighs'
wax and wane
remembered.
The white windowed
filament of time
is burning.
Winter for the Robin
The night had broken down in inches,
marked by raised choirs of bird noise.
The robin was face down when I found him.
His wings, glacial triangles,
mocked his form,
strapped him down
to the newly found grip
of the pond.
Now, the snow-packed mountains with baby faces
still on, loosen their robes
shaking out survivors of stiffened sleep.
Later, the canvas of snow
unpeels from the hills,
shows the grass
stalks fighting a tightened
earth
to get loose.
Air has wrung out each stray atom;
it is a naked face of glass.
Unknowing, there is a fight
at the bird table.
Fattened thrushes, winter broken.
They are not mourning the missing friend.
The hardness of the hardest of seasons
is designed to kill.
That is what the winter is for,
to divide last year's from this.
One robin
is broken and cloven
from the red,
and startled to sleep in white sheets.
The Beginning
My conception was a blur to me.
The first I knew was the
warm hand over the smutch
of me.
For a month I lay yellowed
in her fabric, adulterating and eating.
What was my shape? I couldn't tell.
I grew –
stretching my fingers
skywards, corrupting the
backbone, my jaws
at the womb.
The doctor said I had potential,
tried to scissor me free
from my mother.
That sky opened right up.
A shrieking red blade
was cursing me in waves.
I divided, divided
over-expressing myself, apparently.
A bloom of atoms
ranged from the blood.
I hid inside
the bones and shivered.
They sent sticky sinews,
arrested my
many faces, blinded me,
froze
the chromosomes
that made me.
Japan
i
From the classroom, the first
shriek of Japan's black lacquer
cracking.
From the street, the head funk
of raining brick and concrete,
the red flair of towns.
From the cities, a mouth not quite deep enough
to swallow the dead
in the collapse
of a country's scaffolding.
From the people: a love prayer
to tables, to save them.
The landmass falling
eight inches east.
ii
The water pulls flat, sharpens as
the gun shot rips across
stinging
a hem of metres,
standing
on hind legs.
The ocean screams
as black flesh swells
a rock wall,
bends a target.
The oiled waves are coming.
The oiled waves are coming.
iii
And now the cats in houses
and now the cows in fields
and now the children in schools.
And now
a mud flat, an estuary sweep.
iv
Now the air is flecking with
a microscopic hail, gelling fibres
to skin and cloth, finding routes in.
Making clay of organs,
making clay of this nation.
The Man
They made him big.
Strong enough to digest
a pen of thieves and criminals.
Thin air laced towards Samhain,
villagers worked briskly, spiral-painted faces
twitching with the effort
of twining man from branch and stick.
The Druid came to bless it
as Taranis banged the floor,
sending mountains reeling,
sheep scattering like sand on a drum.
The storm God shook his sun-cross, sent his eight
spokes of intellect crashing skies above the Gauls to the Danube.
The stars burst with electroshock
and swollen cracking.
Pitchforks and pulleys metalled his birth.
He stood sharpening the hill point
with clayed face, outstretched arms.
Men filled his veins,
advancing under whip slice
and promise.
The villagers, half drunk on gallow frenzy,
turned their palms and fists skywards for explanation.
The Druid's arm fell to this smoke prayer,
the timbre dry to the first pinch
of flame, the bloom of cinder
theory chancing heavenwards.
Taranis, pleased with this oven of God-love,
finger-stuffed the dead back into their graves,
defused his thunder stock.
On the Marriage of William Wales and Kate Middleton ...
He's dead pleased,
but he's not a royalist, no;
he's Welsh for God's sake,
but he's pleased.
The plastic sacks are as stuffed
as bodies in a skin.
They lie twenty deep, fifteen
across, lazy
as a teenager, awaiting
final shape and form.
His fingers will limber it, give it pulse,
freeze it
in fire.
The coffee skin has
thickened in neglect
but his pen won't stop
drawing.
He sits back and studies
the loops of the W, the flourish of the K.
The bags are
waiting.
Bear handed, he splits the face
of a bag and hews a lump
of clay, slaps it
on the table.
Translates it into money.
Genghis
In some sweaty shade of gold
the horse protracts
his nostrils.
Constellations of muscles
flick one by one,
stormed waves of
sharp sable.
On this equine tank
is a man of blood.
His women are split like fruit,
spored with armies.
His machine eats a map
stains it
with a double helix
and dead men.
Half the known world is his.
His empire is a fire.
His eyes open
on every village.
His little suckling mouths
are a million.
Hegarty
Your fur was lightly
smoking a glitter dust
in the dark.
Nothing could be extracted from this.
You were divided from me
by the filth of a shed window,
by the forces that had taxidermied you in the night.
Your radiant black was
a bag of death polluting the yellow tent
you slept on.
You were an unwanted thing, Hegarty.
The uncontested item of a marriage collapsed.
Prettiness had been ripped off your face
in an early fight. Now, at fifteen,
those one-eyed, brawling features
had no ink in the list
of contested things. So I took you.
You inspired fear in some who jumped
at your senile, loudmouthed devil bawl,
the over-eager advance to the lap.
* * *
This week
I threw your name
at the trees and rocks, but it
bounced back,
undeliverable.
I knew then,
as my feet went through the motions,
that the air had wrung itself clean
of you.
All week, my voice met
satellites
pointing the wrong way,
and I felt it.
But this early April shower had
bruised up the morning,
soaked the skin
of the earth in waves
between the sun's forced glare
firing up the slates like
churned-up silver.
In this,
the unlikeliest of things
became mirrors, lit the
damp corners and
there you were, behind the window.
There was the shell that wore you.
The feet you'd slipped on, dustily painting
car bonnets and tables, were now
the furniture of a dead person.
Ed dug the hole, placed you
into some layer with
careful handfuls of earth
that fell to a heavy fist.
Asanas
Here, below the 49th
octave, the world's story
made hieroglyph in red
cell and bone.
I am tracing the
outside curve
of muscle, a deathbed
of two dozen vermillion
petals.
A franchise of neurons
unlocked
and growing.
The crescent moon is
waxing full,
unhooks me
from Samsara.
The Belvedere Apollo
When Anzio coughed him up in 1489,
Apollo was dragging the bones of the sun
across Europe.
Here was the joke of prophecy –
those stone eyes
really had seen through
the fug of two thousand years.
They shelled the God from the pack that bore him,
set his legs standing
in Belvedere.
The quiet grandeur of his gaze,
confused.
His muscles the
tension of a long shot
contrapposto.
But the strophium
still banded his head. Relieved,
he settled
and slept.
The laurels would find new
worship amongst poets,
the artists would charge him,
stuff him with the heady bluff
of Adamic myth.
America would shoot him
to the stars.
Nigeria
In Landrovered shade,
the lion is gold against rust.
Muscled velvet belts blue
and swats a fly.
The boiled air melts space;
his face wrinkles.
The passenger seat holds a man picked dry.
The guns are still in the boot.
His boned hand continues the drive
into that tree. The fingers are just rocks now
and emptied.
But the hand belonging to
the fly-bitten brain once
followed command
and killed.
Machetes peeled the place
back. Drowned the choke
of life shinned
and limbless.
The lion's eyes blind
to this Ozymandias of bricks set in squares,
tyres hanging from trees.
A doll, a ball.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Shape of a Forest by Jemma L King, Kathryn Gray. Copyright © 2012 Jemma L King. Excerpted by permission of Parthian.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,About Jemma L King,
Dedication,
Amelia Earhart,
Water Music,
Nuclear,
Winter for the Robin,
The Beginning,
Japan,
The Man,
On the Marriage of William Wales and Kate Middleton,
Genghis,
Hegarty,
Asanas,
The Belvedere Apollo,
Nigeria,
Walls,
Hymn,
The Kiss,
Curtains,
Mansion,
Found,
Sun,
Sex,
The Birth of Shaman's Daughter,
Astronomy,
Armour,
Ana,
In the barn,
En route to the airport,
St. Hilda's,
You,
Geological,
Winter,
Koyaanisqatsi,
First week without you,
Butterfly,
Prayer,
The Returning,
The Time,
December,
July,
Misophonic,
Madame Coco,
New Year,
Hiraeth,
New York,
N,
List,
SWF,
After the Day,
Cader,
Shouldering,
Spring 2004,
Viktor's Trap,
The Morning, Advancing,
Clairvoyant,
Coal,
Manoeuvres,
Letter to Judges Altham and Bromley from Elizabeth Devise's Familiar,
Cabal,
Acknowledgements,
Copyright,