Manasa
My liver is a big ruby lake singing
With eels and brine. Sometimes
A shudder passes it over its skin
Like a wave. I think your head,
My boy, is calcified. You keep
Staring at your winning teeth.
The overlapping fangs, they turn
Inwards, against you. I knew
A boy whose viper tooth reached
Right into his skull – his eye-socket.
I thought he would kill me but was
Disappointed. The fire-axe slept
In its glass box. All around the castle
And the bay lit with fires and
The piggy-park, we philosophised.
We drank and gulped and plotted.
You smelled like juniper berries,
Anti-freeze and mushrooms.
We took ourselves to a little blank shack.
Slept on the flagged floor ‘til our
Baby-bones shattered. My hips
Might have dislocated after the birth
Because of those nights. And there
Was something there – unbidden.
There was something. Behind some
Multi-dimensional veil, imprisoned
In the gutting room, not sleeping
Or moving, or whispering but
With us. A curtain of thinnest vellum –
An imprint or thumbprint or some
Shadow not ours. You saw the skeleton
Jolt on the stone floor. You had
Sucked up all the anthracite.
You had come very far. Redhead,
Shrinking before me. I packed
My cuts and blisters in clay, shoved
My feet into their combat boots,
Walked as far as I might – a weight
Like the yellow snake round my neck.
I drew in my heat, and took
Everything I wanted.
Slingers
All that jaw in your face. Jaundice
I thought was all the orange juice.
We liked our vodka with it & Melleril,
A little heroin and microwavable burgers.
No one should die shivering like that
At least a fairly warm death or
I don’t know. When you know you are
About to die violently and there’s
No way out your body floods your brain
With so much dopamine
You can’t feel a thing. Want to know
How I know that?
Rhett Butler
Always I’d be dragging a skirt
Made of old curtains through
A river pissing blood, all
Torn up. Summer used to be
High yellow. And we never got to eat
Butter. Sometimes some strange
Kinds of pink tinned meat
Eaten from a wrapper on the way
Home, thirsty and wandering –
Thinking, going flowerpicking
On your own. Imagining Rhett Butler
As the father not the junkie father –
The lover the one delayed
Smiling like a slapped ass,
Handing me the lunchbox,
Sitting on the doorstep of a
Repossessed terraced house
Sleeping fine behind the sleep factory
Gnawing its teeth through on my dreams,
Winding the dial over and over,
Greensleeves and stuffed doll shadows –
Slumped by the windowsill where I sit
To get cool and wait for Rhett.
Locked in past seven at night for the
Falling, when the sky has a shiner
Or worse. Sat on the ironwrought steps
Counting white butterflies shivering, many
Scarlet and rosepetal, cough candy so
Very nice if I ask him. And
A hoe-down and a ball where the
Frogspawn stinks in the puddle there of
Burnt amphibians – the sun too hot and
The ferrets and the white mice living their lives
Out in the coal scuttle. Spiders dancing about
Our bitten legs. When my sister
Played with boys she got her hand all
Cut up. I dressed it with my best
Lace socks. She bit me twenty-two
times. Pink and blue chalk hopscotch.
The scary green light like a holographic
In the forest past the big road one hundred
Miles long and it can take you home,
But there’s no way of going. Blinking in
The phonebox in the midsummer rain
And he drives to visit me, Rhett,
With his hay-smelling baby rodents and these
Ill-gotten treasures. Rhett at Sunset. Rhett
Driving the Milk-Float. Rhett and me locked in
The damp Broom Cupboard. Fingers on the
Ivory phone where the numbers wind around,
Always go back to the start with a ring.
A leather wallet, and a catapult. I
Have it all in my jewellery box,
The musical ballerina with her spinning
Cut off head, my sister she gets angry about
Beautiful things. A rack of old knuckles,
For three billy goats. I rap my knuckles
On the bedhead when he closes his smoky
Eyes lays back all remorseful and
The friendly moon stops glowing
Just like that it stops radiating the light of the star
For just about the last honest hour of every night.
Melissa Lee-Houghton’s first three poetry collections are published by Penned in the Margins. She won a Somerset Maugham award for Sunshine in 2016. Her first novel, That Lonesome Valley, is published by Morbid Books and was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2020.
