How Fuchsias Look Artificial in a Good WayIM Tita Gatrell
When she dies
I feel the need
for colour
like a child needs
colour from cheap glitter pens
uneven lines
that can never dry
globbed from tubes that give up the ghost too soon
I want to print out her picture
the one in which she walks into the frame swinging at life
beneath the huge lowering bushes
of bright fuchsias on that grey day
the one when she wore fake flower hair pins
in riotous echo of the banks above
but the files don’t load
the pins don’t hold
the photo kiosk is crap
all the little thumbnail tiles
are drained of their vibrancy
that must have been sucked out
of them when she took her last breath
I go home and start making things
like a child makes things
without a care for their finish
arrangements out of the worst
impromptu harvesting in garish hues
cards that warp with cheap glue
nothing not even really stupid personalised numberplates
that I read on the way back from the two dollar shop
makes me feel any better
Visitors Has the day invaded the night or has the night invaded the day? (Louise Bourgeois) The dead daddy long legs folded in on itself looks like a nymph. On the light blue bathroom tiles its shape is classical, so when I go to sweep it up it wants a burial. I take it to the backyard but where, why? Unlike the cellar spider the backyard folds out and makes itself or different versions of itself available. I feel stupid burying the spider-nymph. What to say to it, the garden? This agreement of folding in and out is between them. It is only coincidental that I am here at all. The cats, the kingfisher, the lizards chasing each other comically, the rescued frog, the rabbit, and the quenda, all the little wrens, this is their realm. At night it also belongs to the stars I can’t read. The star map in the old taped-up atlas stays closed, unconsulted. Everything hangs—visitor resistant though not unfriendly. It is beyond ideas of simple connection and yet the connection seems simple enough. Some other in the spider-nymph’s circle finds my left arm later that night when I am reading. I don’t take this as well as I should have. I don’t search for a new corpse though my eyes are constantly drawn into corners. I know when I wake that the backyard will not be available again in the same way but I buried the nymph at our entrance/exit so she is always there until she’s not.
Lucy Dougan’s latest book is Monster Field (Giramondo). She is currently the poetry editor at Westerly.
Locative Magazine 