Issue 32: Helen Tookey

Perpetual Calendar

Small brass acrobat. You push with your finger,

it flips itself over and over, numbers sliding neatly down

one onto another. You’re a god, you can slow time

or speed it up. You can make it stop,

if you fix the small brass rectangle in just the right spot,

numbers halted mid-slide, days seized

until, made afraid by your own act,

you bring it all back, the rhythmic flip, the swish-click

of time sliding over itself, endless, appeased.

Under the roof

Under the roof you sleep among objects,

things for which no place has been found.

This house and you both recent arrivals, taking up space

where before there was – what? An odd, awkward

angle of land, a few months’ marriage.

This room whispers to you, tells you to open

the door to the crawlspace, where warm air drifts,

where the bones of the house seem to hum.

The space is stuffed with yellow cloud – don’t touch it,

they said, never put your weight on it.

You shut the door but the room still whispers.

There are voices on the reel-to-reel,

the big heavy silver box that sits on the floorboards.

You thread the tape, push the switch

and the voices rise, high and bright, burning

behind your closed eyes like looking too long

into the sun – hey, Mister Tambourine Man,

play a song for me. You follow them out

through a dazzling morning, drawn by what

you’ll never find and will never stop wanting.

Seafloor

          (John Minton, Children by the Sea, oil on canvas, 1945)

We are far down inside the green.

We slide through the walls,

the walls slide through us.

We are shifting planes,

there is no depth to us.

The walls are alive,

they are rock-creatures, sea-stars.

We pluck the creatures from the crevices,

fasten them onto our clothes like brooches.

Sound travels fast underwater

but we don’t need it.

Our thoughts slide without resistance,

mix with the tiny chalklike bodies

that drift forever down to the paths

that wind between the broken walls.

Were we ever like you?

Yes, once, perhaps.

Don’t make us go back.

Originally from Leicester, Helen Tookey now lives in Liverpool, where she is Reader in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published three collections of poetry with Carcanet Press: Missel-Child (2014), City of Departures (2019) and In the Quaker Hotel (2022). In her current writing she is attempting to explore (among other things) ideas about time and identity through time.

Copyright © 2024 by Helen Tookey, 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