Letting Go Plato
by and published in Edition Ten of Pomegranate
I tried to tape worm
Your tall tale out, warm milk
Haul you through my mouth.
Two-handed, I thought I’d done it.
But it was clown’s work and
Even if you’ve left,
Something’s still there: basilisk shapes, dark changers,
Teethmarks and echo barks,
A hoard of shed skin. Our potato sacks in pipework,
They don’t stop.
Umblical, like worms we halved
Almost regrew heads again, but it’s hard.
The wrong jawbone, swapped nostrils
Eyesockets like broken wings,
Four-eyed child bride bringing me nothing.
A might-have-been leapord, like the rest.
Deep within me, enough blood
To fill two bodies, doubled up.
Your head, my head.
One and two
To lose you I tried cakes of soap in socks,
Guard dogs, fires, falls and failure.
Spells and phonecalls, Hair dye ammonia,
Batons and bludgeons and locks.
The sound of heels in rivers,
Goliath’s laughter.
I ate a beginning built of breach births,
False starts,
Mouths full of earth and water.
The coming and going Wonder Woman
Fraudster saying the same thing
Over and over
About
A neck that was not your neck
Knuckles and tongues and trapdoors out of it –
Someone promised safety nets.
Barbaric acrobat; butter legs,
Found an uncaught fish with flapping fins
To build my own structure of stings,
Tied tight below,
Vertigo, vertigo –
I swim above whale mouth doubts,
Trappings and amber, your frozen fossil sea:
Finally feel milkteeth fall out of me.
Harriet Moore
Harriet Moore has been published by Magma and Pomegranate, and she also recorded with Poetcasting for the Pomegranate audio issue. She is a second year at UCL studying English Literature and is President of the UCL Young Writers Society, which is a lot of hard work but means she gets to have open mic nights in her basement in Mile End and drink red wine on the Union’s budget.