week
one:
pattern
for knitted
swimming
trunks
will
pay postage
week
two:
Record
by The Turtles
She’s
Rather Be With Me
willing
to pay all costs
week
three:
Eye
needed for an emu
(Rod
Hull’s 70cm/27 1/2 in puppet).
Will
pay costs
week
four:
knitting
pattern for a
lady’s
jumper with a
blue
and white chinese
willow
pattern on the front
week
five:
Aretha
Franklin CD
or
cassette, The First Time
Ever
I Saw Your Face.
will
pay all costs.
week
six:
Microwave
Cookery Books
Will
pay postage.
Week
seven:
Manual
or photocopy
for
a Sharp QL310
portable
memory display
typewriter.
Will pay costs.
Week
eight:
Instructions
for a sony
ericksson
K7001 mobile
phone.
will pay costs
Week
nine:
Copy
of the late Steve Conway’s song,
My
Thanks To You.
Will
reply to all letters.
Will
pay postage and expenses.
Week
ten:
Hayne’s
Ford Focus
LX
2011 car manual.
Will
pay costs.
Week
eleven:
Knitting
pattern for
anything
using two odd
pins,
one small and one
large.
Will pay any costs.
Week
twelve:
DVD
of the film, The
Merry
Widow.
*
I’ve got
so much love to give I just don’t know where to put it
You are
ready to notice something
you offer
all
while
guarding close
you want
our bodies to buck, bite, give in.
You’ve
got to care
We merge
interest,
I ‘ll
wear that polka dot dress
and you
know I always fall head over heels
for
boys with holes in their converse.
You
illuminate me, cherry lips
when you
forsake your vision,
you are
my vacancy.
Palmstruck
as you were
you
caught me, contained me
palm to
palm an arm wound round my waist
you might
even reach my high anxiety
which
performs it’s lies
paid out
in transformed flesh
my head
is in a bitter whorl
you can
sweeten me honey
I know
about the snowdrop in your suit pocket
next to
the parker pen and your spring leaf tie
you shout
your dilemma to appear:
”how to
write the stars you know while breathing dust!”
*
Work of Art
Mark my words,
it’s not just that
it’s Hyper-real,
fast moving,
all the names
I’ve promised
vying in a tiny
hive
That summer was
spiked with jewels
sculpted,
elegant, photo-real
Why am I telling
you all this?
breathless,
rattling off candid matters
It went up in
flames, a riot
An awareness in
the blood line
Nine years of
alarm, a lack of structure
She didn’t have
a clue.
Seeing the stars
she couldn’t sew,
dreamt of
perfume bottles, glass blowing.
Inspired to
cause a stir, proud of it
dresses
kaleidoscopic, swirls solid.
*
the
courage of night makes my ink flow faster
cover
of dark pushes dirty saucepan piles
out
from the side of my mind
there
is the page and me
not
what I didn’t say to him in the train station
and
how I wished I had bent like a tattered tulip
in
the rain and kissed him in the space after
‘’I
might not’’
the
unmade bed folds itself away scattered books and all
the
pen stops resisting my fingers
the
spilt ink becomes less bothersome
I
forget the ex who loathed those splots
reminded
him of his own empty hands
I
know that writing is my most constant lover
and
my most fervent friend of unending
tolerance
even
as I score pages unevenly
*
For Michelina Lewandowska
"I could breathe and I breathed very
delicately."
She
cut her way out with her engagement ring
he
left her that so that they would know
she
was owned even underground.
I
suspect that as he placed the branch on top
(a
third of her body weight I posit from
the
smiling photo pixelated in the metro)
larger
than the child they had,
I
imagine him holding one end
his
friend on the other, assessing its weight
comparing
the pull he feels in his tricep with the dangling child.
He
did not think he would have to face her and tell the court:
‘’the
intention was to scare you: to frighten you off
It
was not with the intention to kill you’’
And
that the holes in box where he had carried her
tasered,
gagged, bound, in a warm jumper to make her comfortable
were
air holes, and not where his fists had been visible
as
they laid the box into the hole.
*
twist
want, you’re not a telephone,
facing
multiple problems is daunting
history
is needed to avoid rows,
making
as many mistakes as I can.
Time
wasting evening turns to park music
the
scandal of your opinion
counts
to move on
*
why I will not fuck you
I
am sure your tongue is artful and practised
but
being pursued by you is no compliment
no
woman wants to feel interchangeable
all
I am is a challenge, I won’t offer up
the
body parts you praised in silver plated tones
you
expect me to be impressed by pure mechanics
and
that hip roll you learned from screen
I
want a man to honour me with his fucking
to
feel that laying hands on me is privilege
and
not a right
I
cannot appraise the contents of your heart
by
looking at your cock
I
do not wish to possess it just for this
merely
to know what is inside it
*
We viewed relics,
supposedly
enclosed:
the
flesh which pumped,
spewed,
such cells recieved
highest
by popes, priests
beside
white brittle lies of
cock,s
legs stole from
the
pot, the cook,s eye
she
swore focused out the glass:
the
silver fork stuffed
bloomers
of the house
opposite,s
boy brought up,
his
lust extreme
his
teeth chewed just roots
over
the hedge forever
whole
deer cover his buffet.
*
Dear
Birdhouse,
We
are instructed to make a little birdhouse in our soul. Where does one place
such an object when one does not believe in such a theological construct. It
supposes a soul has a hole in it, that you could with a thumb, slit it like a
fragrant almost human tanned skinned apricot, thumb a space deep inside, a
little room for a man to hide or place the birdhouse in afterwards closing the
flesh, hiding starlings. Fluttering forever in your soul, the cause of
emotional fervour; trapped flight. The birdhouse shrunk as simply as a child
perceives their own translucent thumbnail to be the equal if the cresent moon.
Romans called the soul the animus; to remind us we are all animals, our arms
featherless wings, we have spent our lives as a species relearning how to fly
once we were grounded by evolution,
Yours
perplexed,
*
Anna Percy was born and educated in Norwich. Graduated from Manchester University in 2009 is the author of two chapbooks Ghosts at the Dinnertable (2007) and Typewriter Sparks (2011) Her blog iswww.mostlynocturnalscribbler.wordpress.com She has been writing for performance and publication around the country for eight years. Her work encompasses love, loss losing your mind the pastoral and the surreal.
