Rachel Carney

Bathtime

after Frida Kahlo and Pascale Petit

The plastic bags are swollen and distorted. You are surrounded by small hotels, and men in suits, and boiling volcanoes. It is always raining, in this story. Someone is always screaming, far away. And all the foxes you have not forgiven yet are plastic dolls, with staring eyes and missing limbs. You’re tangled up in wet discarded dresses, draped in necklaces and earrings that you’ll never wear again. The pens and mugs and skeletons are bobbing on the surface. The books are floundering, like drowning insects. Their tentacles grab at you, but you ignore them. An old car tyre bumps against your leg. The smooth white edges of your past are pressing in. But all you need to do is pull the plug, and let it suck and gurgle down the drain.
 
**
 
The ratio of paintings with trees in them, compared to without trees, is 
alarmingly off balance​

inspired by a line written by a museum visitor as part of an interactive display at National Museum Cardiff, Wales
 
I was walking through the gallery one day, and I looked up and saw a pine tree that wasn’t there before, in the background of a large family portrait. Did I imagine it? Perhaps. But the following week, it happened again – a sly oak had sidled into the lower right-hand corner of a landscape by Richard Wilson of its own accord. The two trees were still and silent. They stared across the gallery at each other. Shy. Observing. It felt somehow rude to break their concentration, so I left. And each time I returned, there was another tree – a conifer beside a waterfall, or a holly perched on a rocky outcrop, doing its best to look sublime, but unobtrusive. The trees came, one by one. Some were curious. Others kept themselves to themselves. Some displayed their leaves like trophies. One day, I arrived and found a gallery so full of trees that no-one could shove their way inside. It’s there, still – a dark, pulsing forest at the heart of the National Museum, hidden behind a door.
 
**
 
Child’s Eye View
 
beginning with lines written by a museum visitor in response to a painting by Johann Zoffany
 
Henry Knight stood back / and the children set off by themselves, / and all the children died, and all the flowers died, and the adults died, the museum closed, and the paintings stopped breathing, and all the figures in them vanished overnight, and all the hamsters and the guineapigs flopped over and died, and the angels in heaven died, too, and the unicorns died, and the dogs and cats and horses died, and the knights in shining armour, they all died, and the stories fell over and died where they stood, and the Barbie dolls and Cindy dolls died, and all the ducks died, and the wasps died, the slugs died, and everything everywhere died, because who, really, needs a happy ending?
 
**
 
Sculpting Snow
 
I’m sculpting words in snow, but the snow keeps melting. Or there is no snow. No ice to speak of, or to listen to. I crawl back, slowly, on swollen hands and knees, wincing. Back to the point where the two paths diverged, only to find that the shape has all but gone. Each word is weighed down, white and formless. Again, I try to carve them all out of snow: the fox, the moth, the moth’s thin wing, the road, the ice-sharp night, the maw of fog that swallowed my small car on the Holy Island causeway, all those years ago. That heavy prayer. And, still, it falls, melts, sinks into mush around me. This snow that is not mine, that is not snow.
 
**
 
Cracked
 
Birds fall, softly, onto the dry ground, and everybody stops to look. Even the leaves crack under their feet, like tiny bodies that have given up. There is something suffocating about all that silence. All those feathers. That unbearable heat. Can such ideas grow? Or do they moulder, and crisp, and shrivel up? Their words are small, polished bullets. So angry. Sharp. So full of hurt that they are flying out in all directions. I try to catch those hard words in my hand, but the fox slips in front of me to snag them in his fur. He limps off, tail drooping, between the trees. My shadow limps behind him.

**

Careful
 
There’s a hawk in my mouth. Every time I open it to speak, she snaps her beak. She is protecting her eggs, hidden among my teeth. Her claws dig into the flesh of my gums. There is a slow, splintering tickle, and I discover a crack forming in one of the eggs, so I take a day off work. I sit there, in my pyjamas, mouth open, in front of the mirror, watching, as a chick begins to emerge. It is pink and scrawny. Damp. There is an unpleasant smell. After a few hours another chick emerges, and then, in the middle of the night, another. They keep me awake with their pathetic mewling. Now I have to be careful not to chew on that side of my mouth. Every few hours the hawk flies off and returns with a mouse or a frog, and I gag on the guts of it. The chicks grow stronger, bigger. My mouth is full of feathers and flapping. I can’t think straight. One day, I cough, and out comes a small hawk. I cough again, and again. The hawks fly off. I rinse out my mouth with disinfectant. I’m glad to be rid of them.
 
**
 
This poem was previously published in Octopus Mind, (Seren Books, 2023.)
 
**

The Test

I went to be tested. They sent me into a booth, told me to stick this swab into the back of my throat, and then up my nose. To twist and twist. I thought it would make my nose bleed, but it didn’t. Instead, what came out was a rush of tiny corpses. Each one looked like a miniature version of me. Each one was so small I could have squashed it flat between my finger and thumb. They piled up on the table, fell to the floor, tumbling over one another. I stood up, legs shaking, and my nose was still spewing corpses. Nobody seemed to notice, so I just tiptoed through, trying not to step on any of them, and fled, holding my nose to stop the flow. It was only when I got outside that I realised it was too late. All of my old, dead selves had spilled out of me. 
 
**

This poem was previously published in Octopus Mind, (Seren Books, 2023.)
 
**

Rachel Carney is a poet, creative writing tutor and academic based in Cardiff, in the UK. She has recently completed a PhD, examining how ekphrastic poetry can help visitors to engage with art in museums. Her debut poetry collection Octopus Mind explores themes of perception, creativity, and neurodiversity, and was selected as one of The Guardian’s Best Poetry Books of 2023.