by Fran Lock
content warning: working-class girlhood.
…
and so, into every little life, the washed animal emerges. a girl. something wet and receptive, lowered through form. out of the slowly boiling saucepan, to drag itself along. beneath recognition, adjacent to flowers. a girl is born in the feathered cleft of an angel. if i could unthread my eye of sight, i would. you can’t unsee. his fist thrust through the plywood door. the voice that is filling up my head expands like insulating foam. how did she come? redolent and tenderised, through any appropriate opening, membrane of mute preciousness and table manners. she was shooed ahead of the men with brooms, was hung from a flexible pole by her feet. it does not matter. a discreet white loaf, wrapped in terrycloth. summer of multiplied failure, in the frenzy and the fold, life was waiting: immeasurable future wound. she ate her arrival, the animal, hanging on by the crooked awns of her arms. her country was a shadow, falling across somebody else’s map. mourning formed a crust. an abacus bead on the back that carried her; woman who prayed for release beyond birds. into every little life, a hole. the red event of her, dawning through dilation. out, into reservoirs of sour regard. animal wishes for glory, magdalene’s suit of perturbing fur. voluptuary mane. thicket of fire between self and world. she would overturn his thesis of force. but no. girl must make rosettes of her intentions, sagging under his soft necessity. purposed bird in bells, in tight cap of tears. and so she wonders where: network of ecstasies? where: centurion of tombs? his voice, a season in the ear, or wadded round the sting of being less like sanitary cotton. animal learns to crawl. animal walks the river. animal walks the rails. where: her other? shoulder the diminished heat of it all the days of her doing. twice outside of skin, the animal. little make-weight. so they will not notice, so she does not have to see – this loss – will organise around it with such fastidious care, the little life, the human world, her pretty teeth and hair.
