Jessica Mookherjee
TEN PIECES OF WOOD
Dog Shaped: by weather, my face
and my hand is splintered.
The woman in the Window Frame: hangs
her rags on red walls, in the house
nothing dries.
Resting: If I lie here a while, just touching your outer edges, lean
upon you, if you don’t notice me touching, is that OK?
Distance: Can barely whisper, I wish you would lean on me,
like you used to last year when you were free,
I wish I could see you better.
Erection: You didn’t hold me up, I was going to that dishevelled hut in the middle of the wood anyway.
That man who used to shout downstairs, I think we killed him: His nurse came to see us
after one bad night, do you remember? She told us he had a disease that made tiny noises
sound loud as thunder. We got drunk and danced, do you remember?
Animals: I have this rodent living inside
My guts, gnaws sharp teeth to the sounds of the forest.
Moss: the forest crumbles into peat and I could roll
Green, push away the soft and stay there, all warm.
Exposure: when there is no door anymore, just rotten
Frames, anyone can get in.
Soon everything will be trees: when wild flowers take over the earth, when moss
Turns golden, when maps make no more sense
Than patters swallows make, then everything
Will be trees.
FLIGHT PATH
I was hiding out, upstairs from Sharon,
whose brother was killed in a pub fight, smashed
with a snooker cue and her daughter looked like
Hitler, but spitting and tatooed, and Sharon yelled
at her why can’t you be like her, get an education, a job,
I looked at the girl and mouthed cutpurse girl,
footpad, felon, come with me to E17, babysitter,
throat slitter.
I was downstairs from the peeping tom who trained
his telescope to look into Lorraine’s bathroom
and her daughter, Siobhan hid in my flat, played chess
and said, teach me that gospel shark, beak, all learner shover,
teach me how to be a water caster, we’ve got no books
no plants or wallpaper, just floorboards and a big TV
from Asda and I whispered come with me to the forest
and I’ll show you seedling, sapling, sapwood, crown,
show you what you can become.
Take her, take her pied piper, take the city rats
and shaker makers. Dress in pied and motley, cover
mottled and daub on the city lines. Follow pigeons
and magpies into the woods, find the witches’ house,
tell your secrets to limber your timbers, cut purse, foot pad,
felon, tricheor, beak bunting out of the never never
where the Marxists died.
We went to the dogs on a Saturday night,
I watched them chase hares on the back of my neck, I was
making noise, hiding in quarries, hanging out
with William Morris in Epping Forest. The birds showed
me the best places, dirty spaces, I was found wrapped
on the roundabouts and the old estates where I’d flown.
Dog Shaped: by weather, my face
and my hand is splintered.
The woman in the Window Frame: hangs
her rags on red walls, in the house
nothing dries.
Resting: If I lie here a while, just touching your outer edges, lean
upon you, if you don’t notice me touching, is that OK?
Distance: Can barely whisper, I wish you would lean on me,
like you used to last year when you were free,
I wish I could see you better.
Erection: You didn’t hold me up, I was going to that dishevelled hut in the middle of the wood anyway.
That man who used to shout downstairs, I think we killed him: His nurse came to see us
after one bad night, do you remember? She told us he had a disease that made tiny noises
sound loud as thunder. We got drunk and danced, do you remember?
Animals: I have this rodent living inside
My guts, gnaws sharp teeth to the sounds of the forest.
Moss: the forest crumbles into peat and I could roll
Green, push away the soft and stay there, all warm.
Exposure: when there is no door anymore, just rotten
Frames, anyone can get in.
Soon everything will be trees: when wild flowers take over the earth, when moss
Turns golden, when maps make no more sense
Than patters swallows make, then everything
Will be trees.
FLIGHT PATH
I was hiding out, upstairs from Sharon,
whose brother was killed in a pub fight, smashed
with a snooker cue and her daughter looked like
Hitler, but spitting and tatooed, and Sharon yelled
at her why can’t you be like her, get an education, a job,
I looked at the girl and mouthed cutpurse girl,
footpad, felon, come with me to E17, babysitter,
throat slitter.
I was downstairs from the peeping tom who trained
his telescope to look into Lorraine’s bathroom
and her daughter, Siobhan hid in my flat, played chess
and said, teach me that gospel shark, beak, all learner shover,
teach me how to be a water caster, we’ve got no books
no plants or wallpaper, just floorboards and a big TV
from Asda and I whispered come with me to the forest
and I’ll show you seedling, sapling, sapwood, crown,
show you what you can become.
Take her, take her pied piper, take the city rats
and shaker makers. Dress in pied and motley, cover
mottled and daub on the city lines. Follow pigeons
and magpies into the woods, find the witches’ house,
tell your secrets to limber your timbers, cut purse, foot pad,
felon, tricheor, beak bunting out of the never never
where the Marxists died.
We went to the dogs on a Saturday night,
I watched them chase hares on the back of my neck, I was
making noise, hiding in quarries, hanging out
with William Morris in Epping Forest. The birds showed
me the best places, dirty spaces, I was found wrapped
on the roundabouts and the old estates where I’d flown.
Copyright © Jessica Mookherjee 2019
Jessica Mookherjee is a poet of Bengali origin. She grew up in Wales and London and now lives in Kent. She has been published in many print and online journals including Agenda, Interpreter’s House, The North, Rialto, Under the Radar and Antiphon, The Moth. Her pamphlets are “The Swell” (TellTale Press 2016) and “Joyride” (BLER Press 2017). Her poems appear in various anthologies including Templar 2016, Eyewear’s Best of British and Irish Poets 2017 and she was highly commended in the 2017 Forward Prize. Her first collection was published by Cultured Llama in 2018 and her second Tigress will be published by Nine Arches in summer 2019.
