Issue 19: Claire Crowther

AFTER LIFE

i
Don’t Go, I’ve Multiplied


How would you know whom I hold?

But stay, I’ve been assigned

sub-demiurges –

like a glut of

therapists 


gesticulating, corpses

steeled to relaxation,  

ghosts beyond need (though

they’re not top gods

surely) – who


turned up and pushed my truck off

the road. Now I’m like new,

mechanic girded

with spare parts. Who’ll

bifurcate?


Who’ll split? Who’ll uncan your cold

humanness? Disorgan-

ise selfness and shared

immortals care

more for you.

ii
Soliloquy, Dead Dog Revenant


I crawl – I’m used to this – through Furtive Wood.

Its roots


pick and dig urged on by caws and whirrs. ‘Why

did I


work those hours?’ my man says. He meets me now

each day


where boys circled, chanting: ‘On your belly.’

There was no


space between blows. Their bikes beamed ten lenses.

They hit


my back with rectangular wooden legs.

Paths crumble


under bramble. Blood smell. Ssslick, ssthlik,

lizards


lick the bark. Crows crack open the ferns. Doves

rattle


the trees to let me through. Sometimes badgers

unsett.

iii
Wicked Weather


In Cardio, for Lung Function,

under a pole suspending drugs,

a prison guard sits down, chained

to a bird in front.


The prisoner, wearing one of those

thin gowns that gape, stares at the wall’s

promulgation: Due to snow,

we’re spreading grit today.


The guard puts out her hand. She can’t

reach magazines to read. She rests

and their bracelets shine.

Claire Crowther’s latest collection is On Narrowness (Shearsman 2015). Her pamphlet Bare George, resulting from a residency at the Royal Mint, was published by Shearsman in 2016. More of her poems can be heard at the Poetry Archive.