Issue 32: Alison J. Barton
DECEMBER GRAVEYARD
Cambridge
We talked of abundance
their love of languages
mine who read his whole life
what lucky joy, I love you, you love, I you
at the university Nick Laird’s poem made me cry
this place is not ours
it is where new things will smother and pinch
nothing is going to last from now
each step on shambled Cambridge tiles shakes my nameless unease
Plath gothic
on one side
a field of iced pastel green
the other, a victim’s velvet black
I told her we didn’t have long
I can’t hold this story forever,
can’t bring it to light
my throat took the blame
tasted like burnt milk
she must dream the shape of the crockery her mother chose
nothing is ever fully formed
The way to her grave and back
Cambridge behind me,
I left the part that couldn’t be faced
(everything a mother forbids)
and thought, I’ve always wanted to be a small woman
what was every day made of for her
filling time knowing what was coming
her head against the concrete
what it took to go to the oven
how could such a giant be buried here!
such a monolith, dead! I gasped
reduced to so shrivelled a cask
her work a triumph! she a triumph!
no one will find the suicide journals
the angry fuck hate books, she must have thought
I took the bus back down the long slope
her earliest works at my wrist
she was the first and last to say, I have lived here before
her frightful error that she should have waited
I have her tyrant in me
keeping me in order
filling the pages
lying
Sylvia
filled with passion, young Sylvia joy!
her excited self! Her love, love, love self!
She revelled in pleasure, life
limerent, hunched over journals,
wanting to write and write and write,
to be in love but mess, mess, mess.
my heart hurts. oh, oh, oh, it hurts!
almost done she’s getting ready now
she doesn’t know how long
darkening as she goes
you killed, killed, killed me!
Alison J Barton is a widely published Wiradjuri poet. In 2023 she was the inaugural University of Cambridge First Nations Writer-in-Residence. Alison’s work appeared in Best of Australian Poems 2022 and 2023. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Not Telling, will be published this year with Puncher & Wattmann.
Copyright © 2024 by Alison J. Barton, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author