Angela Readman's poetry collection Strip is available from Salt Publishing. She is writing and currently looking for fun and exciting new things.
Tom and Jerry Transaction
The day I started nursery
I wore Tom and Jerry pants
with a bow like a birthday on the front.
I experienced first popularity
as boys queued and asked to read
the comic strip under my slip.
One offered half a Snickers,
so I lifted my skirt.
It was the same day
I found a bird, dead on the doorstep.
Sat on the path with legs crossed,
the cold on my lap, blinking,
silently opening
and closing its wing.
Mom lifted me onto the counter,
gouged eyes from potatoes and asked
what I had learnt at school
and all I could say was ‘something.’
Postcard from Route 66
The old house is a used stamp,
edges perforated where I tore it from
the sidewalk where Mom turned Raggedy-Anne.
Her blood has cleaned itself away to the gutter
and taken itself all the way to the sea.
Dunes may shift but I’ll comb the sands, as if I can find
broken chains, the small pearl, all of her that has been lost.
We will churn out of who we have been,
and onto Route 66 on a ticking bus
so silver it slices the sun.
Postcard from Hotel California
A picture of a greyhound on the side of a bus
I imagine will always make me smile.
The old man smells of pomade,
the daisies in his hand are lightning rod straight.
A woman leaves her good lips on an egg sandwich
and my sister hurls into a Playboy
someone tucked into the seat.
My head is full of Hotel California.
I picture myself with Malibu skin at a dresser,
combing my hair with fingers of sun.
My life will be palm trees,
a crowd scene on a beach. Somewhere
on the postcard is a pinpoint of colour,
you can’t quite make out: she is me.
One Thing
The leaves quiver an elderly hand,
so slight I need to adjust my eyes.
Rustle of breeze like a prom dress
being tucked into a car. I lie in long grass,
with the day on my face as my closed eyes bubble
with fields of rape, a tremble of yellow.
The hum of a tractor far away
as Mom’s Hoover at the foot of the stairs.
I saw a picture of sunflowers once,
a fire of colour, so angry you knew it cared.
This is what it feels to be a cat,
just this, warm, light.
wheat licking my legs.
With my eyes half-shut
I have learnt to be my own Van Gogh.
Jake is here in slow swirls,
grass trails my nose
like his BMX circling my street.
The bread clips I saved for him,
to add colours to the brake lead of his bike.
My skin is no more than a reflection
of buttercup under a chin. So warm
the sun can’t be bothered to wear his hat.
‘Hey sleepy head,’ a whisper like corn,
as he looks at me through the hair over his eyes.
He is so beautiful, a dream
I don’t want to wake up from.
His light as bright as the fireflies
he caught in an old screw-topped jar.
As the sun slipped behind the roof tiles,
we gazed into their insect bodies,
heard the beat of wings like a shuffled deck of cards.
‘See, we make our own candlelight.’
He has a beauty so golden I have to keep
its secret, before he is surrounded by fools.
My advice columns from women’s magazines
Dad clips out and wants to label him with.
He has pushed me so high on the swings
a sound I never knew lived in me escaped.
And I was flying, really flying,
air beneath me, and feathers on my lips.
One thing, Dad said,
Boys only want one thing.
This face is a puzzle I think I’ve solved,
a something I almost saw
that made me love him more.
The day Jake’s brother died I saw the sadness
and something they couldn’t touch,
something maybe no one else noticed.
He squeezed my hand; I figured that one thing was me.
I made myself a ring of unshed tears,
diamonds I picked and polished from his eyes.
He is so beautiful the sky should weep.
I wait for the rain, feel only the glow on my face.
His cool hands make puddles in sun
that has emptied its bowl onto my skin.
Again, we play the wedding game,
the one day where we’ll be happy ever after,
when we have followed the crumbs of each other
to find our real selves in a little wooden house.
His tongue draws the insides of roses
in my mouth, hair lisps on my cheek
as he says ’This time we’ll play honeymoon.’
I don’t ask the rules.
His hand in the darkness of a blouse,
no one has touched to find where a firework burns
and a heart thumps quick, quick as a rabbit tail,
a white you see in the woods, then is gone.
‘Don’t…’
‘Come on…’
He stops for a while, and moves down,
fingers as deliberate as the outlines of all my hearts
drawn on a note book near his name.
‘Please don’t. I have to go home.’
I see the sparkler that has fizzled itself out,
fuming and grey as he wriggles away.
Right Before the License Plate Game
We drive all the way to the lake
in a green camper van. My sisters
play Happy Families up front.
I dream I walk into an ocean at night,
opening its arms like a giant white swan.
The smell of thermos coffee wakes me.
A tickle like feathers uncurling from my chest.
Mom’s friend standing near.
My tube top fallen down.
A look on his face that won’t let me catch it
before he yells, ‘Hey Sleeping Beauty’s top fell down.’
He laughs, ‘Look at her
covering her little poached eggs!’
How to Make Love Not Like a Porn Star
Teach me to not make love like a porn star,
make me a bed that has nothing to prove. Let’s laugh
at unscripted noises; let’s not care what it looks like.
Make my body forget what it knows.
Let me breathe in and out to the fit of your hands.
Let me let myself not always be camera ready.
Show me a picture of me not ‘doing a Marilyn Monroe.’
Let me see that your eyes are not apertures.
Let’s sink to cliché, let your eyes be rock pools;
I hitch up my skirt and wade in, reach down to return
dirty finger-nailed, with a fistful of small shiny stones.
Teach me to close my eyes without making them.
Teach me to expect no result, zoom in for no reason
on the cleavage of your chin my pinkie fits in.
Let us not talk about the size of anything.
Teach me to listen, find a gasp in your hello,
how you make it sound like the first line in a tall tale.
Let your tongue be a silver river. Teach me to sail.
Let there be hair. Let’s mention things that aren’t hard.
Let my breasts look unlikely in your fisherman’s hands,
the blister from toast like snow globes I find myself in.
Let us wake with limbs tangled as Chinese puzzles,
and garlic bread by the bed. Open your eyes, lashes
like footprints of snow-laden birds; let me pull off the sleep.
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