Lauren Terry
The Other Side of an Apple
imagine the other face is flat or blue in a bowl other fruits with various other names split the whole thing clean in half and in the ovary of the apple there are pits for such pits on the hot wet mound of your tongue things resemble apples pregnant apples in form or colour on the other face is there a knife in its back is there a tooth bot fly feasting shrunken head or abstract flatness god do not touch it imagine god is an apple do not bash it spit god into the sticky palm of your right hand and let it drop lunar orb the fall might kill it spill its pips the push would make it flat on its other face |
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The Sleeping Woman is a Cubist Portrait
Semblance of an unexpended artillery shell,
or unlit table lamp, shade nodding.
She has come apart, a soiled dinner plate –
shattered and stinking, spilling geometric shapes
from the bed’s single frame.
Her members are pure assemblage;
rivet, tongue, and cane.
A plastic butter knife
detaches,
reattaches itself
at an obscene angle –
one pinion limp beneath the sheets,
the other hailing the thing beyond the ceiling.
Beachcombing in the Torres Strait
Washed-up fishing net
slumped on hot sand;
half-buried body
uncapped, bottom-up
in the dune grass.
The flesh-footed shearwater
is rocking,
belly sliced at the core –
spilling sticky fragments
of sharp, discarded things
(ring pull,
leg of a clothes peg,
smooth frosted seaglass,
pen cap, bottle cap, pipe cap ,
balloon clip,
six loose teeth from a comb).
Its trachea is a bendy straw,
half-crushed underfoot.
Semblance of an unexpended artillery shell,
or unlit table lamp, shade nodding.
She has come apart, a soiled dinner plate –
shattered and stinking, spilling geometric shapes
from the bed’s single frame.
Her members are pure assemblage;
rivet, tongue, and cane.
A plastic butter knife
detaches,
reattaches itself
at an obscene angle –
one pinion limp beneath the sheets,
the other hailing the thing beyond the ceiling.
Beachcombing in the Torres Strait
Washed-up fishing net
slumped on hot sand;
half-buried body
uncapped, bottom-up
in the dune grass.
The flesh-footed shearwater
is rocking,
belly sliced at the core –
spilling sticky fragments
of sharp, discarded things
(ring pull,
leg of a clothes peg,
smooth frosted seaglass,
pen cap, bottle cap, pipe cap ,
balloon clip,
six loose teeth from a comb).
Its trachea is a bendy straw,
half-crushed underfoot.
© Copyright Lauren Terry 2019
Lauren Terry is an AHRC and Midlands4Cities poet and researcher at Nottingham Trent University. Lauren's critical-creative PhD thesis explores the dynamic connections between (neuro)psychoanalysis, modernist poetic language, and material objects. She is published by two Nottingham presses, Launderette Books and Mud Press.