Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Eighteen
Winter 2008
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London Particular
Brenda Mann Hammack

So like an underwater swan, Herself brings grace to drowning. If not the pulse, then what keeps stone from weighing down, from tacking Thames, a slurried shroud, not blue, but fecal black to shoulders? What mewls and gasps as mourning doves and watermen make off with muddied scraps, and rats (like scurvied fairies) turn bodies into rafts?  She’s surrounded by bog people there: the ratcatcher’s daughter (wet carrots in her hair); Boedica, aglimmer in her weary silt.

Those cats that won’t be kept in sacks keep coming back, their metrical derision so antithetical to peace of mind and, yet, they’re poetry’s own darlings: mournful, keen, indignant, were-cats that never were human. Herself is not attacked directly.  Luminous sky settles on breast, a thud.  She cannot breathe, and does not want to anymore than she wants to be alone.  She cannot guess where air meets water, and could step off into some nascent century where everyone has fins, where finger skin’s extraneous; ears tendril vincas, and hearts, like sodden figs or bloodfish, float in nests of bone.

           Elsewhere, Makeshift licks another woman’s
           hands, and stares past gossamer image of herself
           (palimpsest of the window) to murk that teases
           round the eaves like hate or suspiring willows.

Beyond, those weevily caracals bide for Baring-Gould to write them down.

The smaller cat (no larger than a book
herself) is not put out by surliness. She’s
pure temerity in tidiness and self-content.
Her chest is milk-froth, three paws ash,
the other oatmeal. This and that make up
the rest of her comportment.

Unlike that vast particular that won’t
be kept to portent’s honesty much less
resemblance to itself from moment’s tick
to next, Makeshift can be counted on
to nestle into reader’s lap, a smoke-thick
honesty though fog damps glass and chaise,
and world devolves to ordure.

As soot-rain patters Spitalfields, Herself drifts ever farther than Potter’s digs, Tom’s-All-Alone, and districts so much odder. Accompanied by bog-stained trulls and cats that don’t fear water, she steeps to tea’s consistency, or grief’s unpolished copper.
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