Boom! Read online

  BOOM!

  For Melody, Phoenix, Summer and Willow

  BOOM!

  Carolyn Jess-Cooke

  Seren is the book imprint of

  Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

  57 Nolton Street, Bridgend,Wales, CF31 3AE

  www.serenbooks.com

  facebook.com/SerenBooks

  Twitter:@SerenBooks

  The right of Carolyn Jess-Cooke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  © Carolyn Jess-Cooke 2014

  Author Website: www.carolynjesscooke.com.

  ISBN: 978-1-78172-175-9

  e-book: 978-1-78172-176-6

  Kindle -978-1-78172-177-3

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

  The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.

  Cover Photograph by Brooke Shaden.

  Printed in Bembo by Bell & Bain Ltd. Glasgow.

  Contents

  Boom!

  I Phone You From the Sumo

  Anonymous

  The Days of the Ninth Month

  Home Birth

  The Right Ones

  The Waking

  The Lotteries

  The Sadness

  Parallelism

  Red Stars

  Different Water

  Each Thing Observed Closer

  Nights!

  The Second Way to Skin a Cat

  Motherhood Diptych

  Symphysis Pubis Dysfunction

  The Only Dad at Playgroup

  Working Mother

  Poem Made From Bits of Newspaper Headlines

  Silence for Schumann

  Staying at Home

  Hare

  Thetis

  Speech Therapy Candidate

  Daughtering

  The Possessed

  To a Zoopraxiscope

  What Matters

  Children of the Bullied

  Sleep Training

  Instrument

  Planet

  Honour Thy Parents

  My Father’s Mother

  Puppy

  Breaking My Father

  Still Life,With Family

  Belfast Murmuration

  The Fourth Child

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Motherhood

  Clay

  In Joy I Have Asked Questions

  One Hundred Years After the Suffragettes

  Life Questions

  The Mire

  Weft

  The Lessons

  In the Hands of an Orange Sun

  Mother Tongue

  All Right

  Acknowledgements

  ‘Nothing is lost, nothing created: everything is transformed.’

  – Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry (1789)

  Boom!

  There was this baby who thought she was a hand grenade.

  She appeared one day in the centre of our marriage

  – or at least in the spot where all the elements of our union

  appeared to orbit –

  and kept threatening to explode, emitting endless alarm-sounds

  that were difficult to decode.

  On the ridge of threat, we had two options.

  One was attempt to make it to the bottom

  of the crevice slowly, purposively, holding hands. The other

  was see how long we could stand there philosophizing

  that when she finally went off we’d be able to take it.

  But then the baby who believed she was a hand grenade

  was joined in number: several more such devices entered

  our lives.

  We held on, expecting each day to be our last. We did not let go.

  As you might expect, she blew us to smithereens.

  We survived, but in a different state: you became

  organized, I discovered patience, shrapnel soldered the parts

  of us

  that hadn’t quite fit together before. Sometimes when I speak

  it’s your words that come out of my mouth.

  I Phone You From the Sumo

  I had a seat close enough to see the buttocks

  of the largest wrestler wearing a blue mawashi

  and the waterfall of flab all down his body

  and it must have been right as he craned his

  leg with the ease of a ballerina to ear-height

  that I felt alone in a stadium of five hundred

  in a city of forty million.

  I watched

  as time froze, as the scattered salt floated

  above the dohyou, as one by one the spectators

  blinked into nothingness and the streets emptied

  until I was the only girl in Tokyo. On the line,

  an echo meant that we talked over each other,

  the freshness of our relationship palpable

  in those awkward, tentative questions. How are you?

  What’s the weather like? Does anyone speak English?

  I had no idea that six months from then

  we’d conceive a child, that we’d already be married

  and the whole fragile dust matter of love

  would grow bones, teeth, a pulse, an opinion.

  Neither distraction nor distance nor curiosity filled

  your absence. Imperceptibly,

  and without any ado, this whole wide world had changed

  its orbit to turn around you.

  Anonymous

  On the monitor

  a sea at night.

  Silver-edged squalls

  toss, argue.

  My bladder a white hull

  seen from underwater.

  The sac a lifeboat,

  waves agitating at its sides.

  A tiny survivor huddles there,

  hazelnut

  of rounded shoulders

  and curled up legs

  (too early for knees, she says).

  Eight weeks and four days.

  The heart insisting,

  insisting,

  candlelight shivering

  on the far shore.

  The Days of the Ninth Month

  for Olivia Chapman

  They are not days, they are cenotes

  riven in eternity, raindrop

  by raindrop,

  wet troughs plunging gravity, bending physics –

  month of centuries, month of drowning

  in my own flesh, month of Joshua’s stopped sun

  around my waist. Her due date sat fixed

  on my Sainsbury’s calendar, I crawled through the squares of it,

  beneath the photograph of quinoa and pancetta salad,

  hefted my body through awful nights of pancaked lungs,

  acidic gullet, punched sinus,

  the crushed, corked pelvis,

  and when someone inevitably chirped

  not long now! That’s flown by!

  when the teasing strands of yet another dawn

  fingered through my curtains

  how can I tell of the courage it took

  to rut the fattened mole of myself

  again and again in black soil, among root-tendrils,

  riverbeds, bones, blunt arrow-heads, history of war,

  to burrow through the month’s clotted walls –

  as though I had to sow and aerate the day

  of her birth in time’s soil

  like something that had never before existed?
/>   *Cenotes are natural sinkholes in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, products of the collapse of limestone bedrock.

  Home Birth

  They said she was stuck,

  as though she was a nine-pound human fork

  pronged in the dishwasher,

  an umbrella that wouldn’t fold to size.

  Stuck because my body had never given birth

  so I pushed until I thought I’d turn inside out

  and yet she sat in my cervix for hours,

  heartbeat like a drum

  as the contractions collapsed on me

  like skyscrapers,

  as they talked about the knife.

  Second time round, the sour sensation

  of complete idiocy

  for willing this pain again, going through it,

  risking so much for someone

  who remained at the fringes of knowing,

  ghosted by awful wisdom

  that birth isn’t the end of it, nor the worst –

  episiotomy; infections; afterpains; breastfeeding.

  But my body remembered,

  it took the first shunt of his head, yawned, then

  toboganned him out in a gush of brine,

  red as a crab. I remember his arms

  like a sock full of eggs, muscular, fists bunched,

  as though he’d been prepared to fight.

  The Right Ones

  The child is laid creaturely in the clear basket,

  human ruby, surrendered arms. The not-yet-eyes.

  The antenatal group laid out what comes next:

  a maternal bond ensures you will recognise

  the parent in your own skin. Follow your instincts!

  You wait. Another certainty arrives in lieu –

  the right ones will come and claim this

  foreign jewel someone entrusted to you.

  The Waking

  Those first few days every part of her wakened,

  the seedling eyes stirred by sunlight, tight fists

  clamped to her chest like a medieval knight

  and slowly loosening, as if the metal hands

  were reminded of their likeness to petals

  by the flowing hours. Her colours, too,

  rose up like disturbed oils in a lake, pooling

  through the birth-tinge into human shades,

  her ink eyes lightening to an ancestral blue.

  The scurf and residue of me on her scalp floated

  easily as a pollen from the sweet grass of her hair.

  She reminded me of a fern, each morning more

  unfurled, the frond-limbs edging away from her

  heart, the wide leaves of her face spread to catch

  my gaze. Once, I saw the white down of her skin

  cloud in my hands, the cream ridges of her nails

  drift like crescent moons, the thick blue rope

  she had used to descend me tossed like a stone,

  as though she was finally free.

  The Lotteries

  The nature of luck changes, too.

  In the two-week window between ovulation and a test

  that will say ‘no’ when the body holds its ‘yes’ in secret

  you read books, pamphlets, websites that bring to light

  that the odds of conceiving on the first try

  are up there with being swallowed whole by a shark

  or kidnapped by terrorists, that each month yields a two-day

  chance

  and even then, it may take a solid year of trying, and

  when the small white square shores up a second line

  luck is against you, with one in four of every such lines

  ending in miscarriage, particularly during weeks five and seven

  which is when you barely move or sleep,

  and when the nausea hits – more violent than any other,

  toes to scalp –

  someone mentions that this is lucky.

  In the widening span of nine months, more luck unfurls –

  lucky that the day-and-night sickness lasts only three months.

  Lucky that the first scan shows a heartbeat, the second, health,

  lucky that the withering anaemia subsides

  with pills (and the constipation isn’t chronic),

  lucky that the pelvic condition isn’t eclampsia,

  lucky that this is your first baby and so you can rest,

  lucky to live in a first world country, blessed by the NHS.

  And when thousands of such mines are dodged

  you are lucky to survive the birth. Many have not.

  You are lucky that the child survives, and when the bleeding

  won’t stop

  you are lucky, again, incalculably lucky,

  and you return home, under the gold light of luck,

  cornucopia of blessings:

  clean water, a cot, infant-friendly bedding,

  and when you are not lucky

  with breastfeeding – not such a simple act of nature,

  it turns out –

  you are lucky that the baby takes to the bottle easily,

  you are lucky when she sleeps four hours’ straight,

  you are lucky that Tesco delivers,

  you are lucky when toast can be eaten before it is stone cold,

  you are lucky to have a shower before 3 pm,

  you are lucky that maternity leave is four weeks at full pay,

  you are lucky when the stitches heal, the bleeding slows,

  you are lucky to find her each morning still alive, pierced

  by the knowledge

  that somewhere out there, some other child has not woken –

  and so the world goes on opening its many bright hands

  of luck

  and when you say thank you

  the lanterns of mercy ascend to black skies,

  changing the nature of night.

  The Sadness

  The sadness that sometimes closes in after giving birth

  is a collar of storm choking that summer’s afternoon.

  No reason, no answer – just there,

  kingly presence, potent in an asking way.

  Brimful of too-dark thoughts, body’s soupy overflow of nurture.

  The sadness that makes a new mother stare, November-ish.

  A film in which everything is falling. O what a falling off...

  Sadness that fattens on knowledge of all that ought

  to be enjoyed and celebrated, but can’t, can’t. Sadness

  that renders everything too much, too loud,

  withering. Blank as rockface,

  each day tunneling into the next. Looping questions.

  A smothering sadness. Bitter harvest,

  bounty of wormy fruit.

  The sadness that is sunlight visiting ice,

  too shy for blaze.The floes of her nose their hooded-woes,

  drowning her for the thousandth time.

  Parallelism

  I hid from Depression

  it found me

  I went incognito

  Depression spied me

  I ate Depression

  it tasted like ashes

  I ran from Depression

  I got cramp

  I tried to reason with Depression

  it fell asleep

  I rugby-tackled Depression

  and fell on my face

  I flattered Depression

  it saw right through me

  I bolted Depression in a steel box

  it slipped out like mist

  I said, not in front of the children

  it gnawed while I played

  I laughed at Depression

  it echoed me

  I tried to predict Depression

  it changed shape

  I masked Depression

  it loved every minute

  I played upbeat music

  Depression talked louder

  I took Depression to the beach

 
; it clothed me in shadow

  I slept through Depression

  it stalked my dreams

  I waited for Depression to leave

  and I waited, and waited

  I tried to forget Depression

  it bought shares in remembrance

  I supplicated Depression

  no offering was enough

  I cried at Depression

  it bathed in my tears

  I asked Depression what it wanted

  silence answered

  I tried to understand Depression

  and was instantly confused

  I challenged Depression to a duel

  it said, we share a heart

  When Depression left, a note read

  I will be back

  Red Stars

  For time did not exist until she was born, nor elephants

  nor raspberries nor the inner smoothness of the scallop,

  for there were no words, neither was there language,

  thus music was not yet conceived, the harp and drum

  being things of fancy. It is she who has created the notion

  of juiciness in this world, and ripeness too, her own species

  of four-month-old deliciousness bringing life to the cherry

  tart and chocolate flan, flooding the world with flavour.

  Feather of swan, grace and delight of the prodigious swallow,

  persuasion of snow on the silent path – none would

  bear their weight against this world were it not for her.

  So too would the menacing asterisk of the house spider

  beg deletion, the guttural pigeon and bobbling bumblebee

  prompt thoughtless swipes without the want she conjures

  for all things to live and go on living in the kind of purpose

  only she defines. Because of her the simple is no more;

  there is only complexity, the body’s machinery and

  the soul’s still pond shining back in the mirror where

  once there was merely a face, some scars. Frightening,

  too, that without her the cruel and vulgar would hitherto

  be excused, the delicate and sacred would forever be

  unsavoured, and that October’s grievous glug of leaves

  in our gutters might never have revealed themselves

  to be red stars, yes, red stars that spin along the overspill

  to the drains where my darling’s breath determines there

  to be nothing but hope, and life, and plenty. For she is

  here, and she lives, and may it always be so.