Embedded Files
AFTER LIFE
AFTER LIFE
i
Don’t Go, I’ve Multiplied
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
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
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.
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