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2 poems by Rachel Curzon

Updated: Nov 29, 2024


Nine days since I heard from you and look how it’s going


Bin day was missed. Note the passive construction, which is ugly and deliberate. My thoughts were elsewhere, or I was not up to its rigmarole. Bin day was missed, at any rate, and all this week the bin has waited for the active mood, its contents pooling in the heat, its contents parting ways with their expected shapes or states of matter, stinking. Note them stinking, contents now putrefying, contents now as sludge, as colonising bacteria, breeding maggots out of the black bags. Note what I did there. Oh, it doesn’t matter. Note that I address a silent interlocutor. Note that all this isn’t and yet also is a metaphor. Watch me, if you will, as I double-bag the dense, unwieldy spoil of it, the rot and ruin of this week, my hands slick with gunk. I am going to the tip, look. So what if I am crying sterile and undashable tears. So what.



Gaia 

 

The mistake was to think myself free, 

his body abruptly slack & pleating on my breasts, his vast thirsts slaked at last, at last, his questing mouth stopped up with shock & something like a grudging pride just flowering in the mirrors of his eyes. 

I pushed him off. Enough, I said. Enough –  

not strident – he had seen to that – but grateful, simply. There would be no more nights like these. I touched my body back to privacy. 

 

The mistake was to think myself free.These men can’t leave without a parting shot: cavalier, he’d thumbed the darkest gift into the spaces I’d won back. My lands; his seed. Even now it roots about my gut. It twists, impoverishes every vital thing but its unvanquishable self. If rage could wither it, if rage could scorch it black  or curdle it, I’d snatch the rest I’m owed, but rage just knocks me breathless while my belly grows. Gall upon this oak, it grows. 

 

I cannot tell what life will stem from this. 

I only know that I am nothing if not furious.


______________

Rachel Curzon was awarded an Eric Gregory award in 2007. Her debut pamphlet was published under the Faber New Poets scheme. More recently, work has appeared in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Propel Magazine and Magma.


These poems were chosen by Anthropocene Guest Editor HLR.


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