Cassandra Atherton
Pre-Raphaelite I wish I had been painted by Millais. Maybe not as Ophelia in a tepid bath. Perhaps as Lady Macbeth. Or Titania. Or Portia. I used to make you sit on a little wooden stool and pretend you were painting me. Stroke after stroke rasping against the canvas. I would unravel my strawberry plaits and stare at you. Sherry eyes. Corsage at my neck. Picking up the small crumbs of wedding cake and passing them through my gold ring. Nine times. But you still didn’t get the hint. And so I am suspended in that moment. Forever bridesmaid. I can’t be Effie to your Ruskin. So blot out the canvas with grey. Euphemia’s hagiography turns on a wheel and a bear, but I can’t be your martyr. Writhing in my skin, I call out to Rossetti to paint me. I make you call me Guggums and cling to wild heartsease. We both know the laudanum comes later. So you paint me. Regina Cordium. Hooded lids. Heart shaped pendant. There are two still babies in the shadows. One within and one without. Broken hearted, I become your posthumous Beatrice. Dig me up Dante! Exhume me. Consume me. Shift the soil between us and gather me in your arms. Chase your journal of poems around my coffin with your fingertips as you hold me. Let me hear your mew of pleasure when you have it. At last. My copper hair fills the empty space. But the worm’s hole in your journal eats away at your heart. ** Plum(b) William Carlos Williams was a genius. And he has my lover’s initials. Or rather my lover has his initials. I often eat the plums that were in the fridge. But I don’t expect to be forgiven. Not everything depends upon that. Or the wheelbarrow of promises that still lies at the bottom of his heart. That’s just a vain hope. My lover likes plums. The ones with the tough skins and the scarlet flesh. Not the yellow. We like the same food. Except for chops. I won’t eat lambs to the slaughter. Once I was called a ‘goo-goo-eyed’ vegetarian. Which basically means I won’t eat anything cute. With big imploring eyes. Because it would be almost like me eating myself. Baby cows are cute. Pigs are cute. And lambs are definitely cute. Even mutton dressed as lamb. So they are all out. But I eat chicken and fish and sometimes beef. If it isn’t veal. He lived on a farm once. So he hates sheep. He tells me that sheep are the stupidest animals ever. They deserve to be eaten. He even tells me the story about how sheep follow each other in straight lines and that the earth becomes shiny and solid beneath their feet. And he and his brothers would ride along their little tracks. On their bikes. Red bikes. Like that wheelbarrow in his faulty heart. One day he might even grow me some plums so that I can pick them and put them in our fridge. I want a red Smeg 473L fridge. I want my whole kitchen to be red. He draws the line at a red fridge. He has never heard of Smeg. Smeagol. Smaug, the dragon. He doesn't believe in the nuance of sound. He doesn’t understand the importance of a big, red, expensive fridge. He thinks they are just for keeping things cold. Like plums. ** Eggs You buy me a Royal Doulton Bunnykins eggcup for Easter; on its side, a picture of anthropomorphic field rabbits sheltering under a red umbrella. Your card says it’s to hold my boiled egg upright; for when I dip in the tip of buttery toast soldiers. But I’m not ready to eat your eggs; I don’t want to be another of your lovers, served deli-style at your kitchen bench. Instead I imagine that when my egg has cooked for four minutes in your saucepan; you turn and tell me I’m as perfect as that egg. But all I hear is ‘First Murderer: What, you egg!’ Ovum. Zygote. On Good Friday it rains and you take me to bed; my ovaries greet you, sunny side up. ** A Room of One’s Own for PH You weigh me down. Like stones in a coat pocket. Until my incandescence is stifled and my ‘nugget of pure truth’ is stripped back to a room in my grandparents’ house in the suburbs where I once wrote poetry. The white desk is still there, pushed against the bay window. If I open the top drawer, I know that my old fountain pen will still be there. Bite marks on the lid from long days at school. The garish hippopotamus curtains are still too red. The carpet is more of an electric blue than I remember. A little fish of an idea becomes a cat without a tail. How do I write the space between my heart and my pen? ** Violinist I liked it when you said ‘Stradivarius’ in the dark. And the odd way you said ‘Pachelbel’s Canon’ with a long sounding pash at the beginning. For three years on Saturdays I’d come to your apartment and eat iced vovos while you played Shostakovich’s Trio No. 2. Until the cut on your finger opened and dropped blood on your fingerboard. Sometimes you’d reward me by playing ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ and I’d dance around the living room singing, ‘Fire on the Mountain, run boys, run!’ You’d put your violin in its case and lick rogue flakes of coconut from my eyelashes. In bed I called you Paganini, whispering ‘devil’s violinist’ in your ear as you played my backbone. Twelve bones per second. I loved the feel of the calluses where your violin rested below the angle of your jaw and above your collarbone. I nuzzled their redness while your finger pizzicatoed up the back of my thigh. I liked it when you ran your bow across the sheen of my hair, imagining the music. But as you played the single string in the cadenza, I realised you didn’t need any accompaniment. ** Tokyo Panorama Suite 1. Century Southern Tower At 5am the sky wraps the bottom of our king size bed in a thick lavender stripe. Your hand is resting on your cheek, fingers fluttering against your eyebrow, as light from Docomo clocktower tints your pillow lemon and lilac. I have grown into a deep silence, and into the cramped voicelessness of morning. Time presses, but I’m the only one who feels its weight. I smooth out crinkles in the bottom sheet with the balls of my feet and you turn toward me—too early to rise, too late to dream, you fill the space between my arms and thighs in a tight enfolding of skin and bone. Later, we wait for the sound of the trains, imagine their coloured stripes snaking through the mazes beneath us. Just above the tip of my toe, Mount Fuji is a tiny white triangle. 2. Kama-Asa In an intimate handshake, the saleswoman fits the knife’s thick green handle into the crease of my palm. It nestles there as my fingers encircle it. I chop the air in rocking motions, imaging onions, heads of garlic, habaneros; and the rhythm builds in my hobbyhorse wrist. When I hold up the blade, my face is a bisected, matte rectangle. The woman places the steel in a vice, hammering my name, before I trace the hiragana’s indentations like reverse braille, learning its inflections and gradients. At the airport, as the exit doors slide open, the customs officer asks if the knife is for cooking. My fingers curl again into my palm. 3. Yomiuri Land On the ferris wheel, you pop a button on my long coat as you press your knee between my thighs. I hear the clink on the bottom of the carriage as the disc spins off the edge. We’re a third of the way to the top and the shadows of spokes and struts snag on our bodies. With your olive coat pulled up to your waist and my stockings binding my ankles, I free fall in your arms. Turning my head, I see the roller coaster climbing its track before catapulting into a cloudy sky. 4. Narita Shrine Your arm is a question mark around my waist, a curve that begins at one hip and ends at the other with the round of your elbow. We walk from the hotel lobby into the lucent morning as darkness lies between your arm and the small of my back. It’s a sort of beginning—squeezing down sloping paths as our footsteps count the years like a series of stretched ellipses. When an ending nags at my collarbone, I sweep it under my hair and touch the back of your neck. At Narita-san Shinsho-ji temple I perform misogi, rinsing my hands and mouth. You feed the gosanke koi in Ryuchi pond and I watch mottled sunrise bloom on their cycloid scales. ** Forgetting Hiroshima Diptych 1. Nothing happened in Hiroshima. Our story ends before we board the Shinkhansen. You should take back the omelettes, wet with eggy juice, and the miso soup served with three silver pieces of mackerel. We weren’t there. We never sat cross-legged prising oysters from their shells; you didn’t cry at the museum in front of the keloid suspended in glass. Nothing happened in Hiroshima. Forget me straddling you in the blue of the Seto Inland Sea, your fingers mapping the irregular coastline down my backbone as a new language haunts our lips // Everything happened in Hiroshima. In the deep silence, a mother calls her child’s name as they pull bodies with a fire hook from the river. 2. Late night, you view the city through the pink of a Sakurao gin bottle. You’re nameless in the lamp’s sepia light, a ghost word in the distillery. I’ve seen the copper still like a shining missile, its funnel tapering into a golden plume. I’ve imagined leaving handprints on its surface, playing the oversized flute to hear the fizz of rising bubbles. I can’t remember if I drank it straight or on ice, perhaps tonic. Did I take you back to my hotel room, or was it the night I remember slipping down my spine? // Now, as lilac infuses early morning, I try to recall your laddered ribcage, the origin of five small bruises on my thigh. Tangled up in bed sheets, all that lingers is the taste of peppery juniper. ** Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised and award-winning prose poet and scholar of prose poetry. Her prose poetry has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Chinese. She was a Harvard Visiting Scholar in English and a Visiting Fellow at Sophia University, Tokyo. She co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2020) and co-edited the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne University Press, 2020) and Alcatraz (Gazebo Books, 2022) with Paul Hetherington. She edited Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australian and the United Kingdom with Peter Johnson (MadHat, 2023). She is a commissioning editor for Westerly magazine, associate editor of MadHat Press (USA) and Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia. |