Mould
Reasonable adjustment: dry your clothes
on the lines provided/
The outer-walls of these flats are shields
grinding trinal shoulder to shoulder cerberean beast
common enemy (sic ‘em) Helios
who slips only phallic strips of searing light
through archways occasionally fingering turrets
Acting in a tenant like manner/
but is yet to blast the façade to dust
There are two types here:
felines unspooling in rare panting heat and monsters
squatting seething in abundant dank crevices
Have you tried the removal of houseplants?
At its core the courtyard exists
in a nuclear winter
the lichen (singular) (lecanora dispersa) long since expired
—mandate, not suggestion/
The ground floor doubles as dungeon
inner walls inching moist with life
microscopic rats scurrying via wastepipes
to lungs
Chisel through gelatinous bind
of vat-birthed mass-produced magnolia for:
Windows must be opened daily/
This fortress unsavoury adorning carapace of penury
sheltering descendants of peasantry
lamenting pre-industrial
Ventilation: crucial/
Albatross – for Nanci
you said it’s not the children
holding mothers back
children make us strong
and I hummed this remark
for weeks regarding a fresh slant
emboldened by our young
not a receptacle for vampyre
nor bruised fruit embedded with nails
but an open palmed woman
rounded hypnotic portal
cyclonic drawing your eyes
to the centre of her cauldron swill
we opened up and yes there were bones
gristle tendons and claws
a snag between one corporeal heft
and another invisible but taut
tenacious I guess both of our late starts
into elevated cultivation
might be for them
as much as for us role model
allocated duty in life and society
was it strength which had us failing
in our duty to society
so young lacking fledgling careers
fattening flagrant brazen
traversing upper street fifteen years
too soon many hundreds
of thousands of pounds out of place
or mere illiteracy of trajectory
you said it’s not the children
holding mothers (who are artists)
back children make us
strong in the face of adversity
the grimacing as we weave
our wombs into a shroud
of runes document self-made
overcrowding traipse inattentive
into goldin’s warning: adult content
after three gawping girls
Therapy
A woman is encouraged to look back
through a lens of distortion, window
thick with the dust of long-term avoidance.
She rubs at that night, at first tentative, and then frantic –
The blow of battering ram
against door. Knock, knock – and here is when
she slips through the glass – collapse.
Men flow through the smoking hole like bees swarming
from the nest at the base of the woman’s compost bin,
disturbed when she rammed the lawn mower into it, except these bees
have hold of the handle, and are more akin to hornets,
the invasive kind in their slick protective armour, who dine on bees,
and she – diminished to pupa – is a bee, all the shadow people
in this flat are bees, buzzing through concrete chambers, the little stings
in their hands paltry compared to the proud blades in the hornets grasp.
Actually, she is not a bee, she has no needling defence,
is of no size, easily squashable, a fruit fly,
almost invisible, mere irritant at the corner of their eye.
And at the discharge of pheromones accompanied by wild
vibrations, hornet blades lurch to the tender of her gut,
and then swing, a moment before impact, indifferent, away.
Bees clutched to thoraxes are extracted from the hive,
one after another after another, until it is just the fruit fly/girl,
and a bee/man, whose name she doesn’t know, and a broken
door letting in the acrid swill of a stairwell.
At which point a woman is coaxed back – snap –
to hospital antiseptic overlaid with ruin of lilies,
and dried husks of arthropods littering the windowsill.
_______________
Kali Richmond is a writer and video artist living in York. Her poetry has featured in PERVERSE, Gutter Magazine, Crows of Minerva, Marble Magazine, and more. Her debut pamphlet, Gradual Reduction to Bone, is out with Nine Pens. She is a current recipient of Arts Council DYCP funding, exploring poverty and addiction through poetry and film.