Five Poems by Ellora Sutton
Waking
After John Berryman.
i.
When I wake up I find scratches shackling my ankles. She is sat next to me unpeeling the Victorian language of flowers from the ceiling. She points to my window, the mould is blooming and my room is blurry. Am I supposed to make her coffee? She is wrapped like a wonton in light. I suppose I am too. Rose, She says, a verb. The sky outside is heavy. Like the sea.
ii.
Rose often thinks of Ursula the Sea Witch. You know,
from The Little Mermaid. Her legs unspooling
like ink. Rose wonders if this is where it began.
iii.
Walking down the street
you look for older women
with buzzcuts or bitten nails.
You are wearing big sunglasses.
Your hair is blonde and heavy.
iv.
No. Rose considers that it may have begun
with Buffy the Vampire Slayer
on a Sunday morning when she was ten.
v.
When I sleep I am a native. Tall yellow grass swallows me whole. Sometimes She is there saying I know I know I know they won’t mind. Sometimes I am alone, measuring my hands against each other. Folding a flag around my knuckles for sucker-punching. The glass makes stars in my feet. The national or traditional dance. She keeps time. Don’t forget, Rose, to die at the end like a swan. It is a myth that swans are silent creatures. Tchaikovsky knew this.
Feeding my neighbour’s blind cat
For Kipper.
I find her in the bathroom and kneel by the tub,
offering the dish. The light is a complete beginning.
She performs the ritual of blessing each knuckle
with the side of her face before blooding her nose
in chicken jelly. Comes out glinting, masticating
as though through the bones of birds half
in the sky or still in the sky which is her mouth,
or a sarcophagus rattling and heavy with gold.
I hold my pose of supplication. Silence
is the language of trust. I leave the lights on.
mary
i.
I am full as a pomegranate. I lollop. I block out the sun. I am unable to part my legs. The sun is paddling the back of my head. I am bedbound by the future. Riding the unsteady donkey of day after day after day in the dirt. Nobody will give up their seat or palm frond. This shirt was seafoam when I started. Now it is lapis lazuli. I can no longer turn my cheek to the window, see the hydrangeas blooming in sympathy. They are still there.
ii.
Mary is forgotten. She doesn’t mean for her face to be there. She comes. She comes laden. Embalmed in cotton. Up to her wrists in oil. Her hands are childish with it. Unbidden. She comes. She comes. Mary, holding the stars. Carrying clay jugs of water.
iii.
You slap the earth, chew it up with your nails. You wrench the sun from it. There is no grass. You beat your chest, which is loose, hanging like a baby. You scream like a wave. You throw your sandals away. You. You. Mary. Temple. Candle. You yank your hair until your head loses its edges. Mary. Your blue gown dangles in the light. Burning like an angel. And you, Mary, staring at the white ceiling until it decomposes.
Warm Beer
The garden is golden-green
and obscene with life. Split. Bursting.
I pour beer from can to plastic cup.
It turns to syrup in the sun. One,
two, up, down on the swinging chair.
A wasp drowns itself. Slosh. Shush.
The camellias are vermilion and blaring.
Anmer
On the 4th June 1913, at the Epsom Derby, Emily Wilding Davison tried to pin a Suffragette ribbon to Anmer, the King’s racehorse.
For a moment they are one –
horse and woman. An explosion
purple and white and green
and bay and red.
Up, up the racehorse gets,
unencumbered, unbridled
colt, shooting down that final
furlong. Each stride fracturing
the earth, leaving it bursting
with fists. Onward, braying,
onward. The empty stirrups
make silver fire. Onward
to those flashing bulbs
of glory and beyond it – rest.
………………..
Ellora Sutton, 23, is a Creative Writing MA student from Hampshire. Her work has been published by Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Mookychick, Poetry News, Cardiff Review, and Young Poets Network, amongst others. Her debut chapbook is forthcoming from Nightingale & Sparrow.
Twitter: @ellora_sutton