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Joanna Boulter (1942 - 2019)
poems and biography as last provided by Joanna: An untidy package, all its granular guts stuffed into a sort of beanbag. Skin contains the seeds, holds them bottom-heavy bellying to a slight sideways droop from offcentre nipples. Faint vertical veins do not succeed in corseting their shape, their generous opulence. And the colour! —they are plush, dull purple. Washed, a faint grey bloom vanishes, returns with dryness. I get a knife, halve one, am shocked by brightness—scarlet seeds in scarlet flesh, and the rind between them and the skin (that smoky plum-colour) is a wholly surprising pale greenish cream, the sort of colour that looks smooth to the touch. It is. But a quartered fig has nothing to hold its shape, no inner membrane, no tension nipple to base. That point of skin, released, lifts, and the tiny seeds begin to fall, a few at a time, bright on the white plate. And suddenly I’m thinking of my own sliced skin, my own severed breast, fallen away into a dish.
How to respond? when an angel comes tobogganing
whee down over the arch of a rainbow (leaving a snazzy multicoloured trail) and ends up tumbling heels over halo
to land thigh-high in a stand of lilies? What to do? You brush pollen from his white nightie, find your comb for his wings;
but this isn't what he came for. His narrow feet grow restless as rollerblades: now he's dangerous, a grounded comet. The air fizzes round him.
The lake is lapis, the trees are all enamelled in emeralds, the courtyard gravelled with diamonds. But his ruby lips are tight buttoned.
There are angels who bring messages, who ask riddles— but this one has skied down out of heaven to perch precarious as a rocket in a milk bottle,
ready to explode the everyday. He's waiting. You have to take a chance. And what you do is write him a flower, pick him a bunch of poems.
Echoes of soundings; lists of stores; names of ratings, live out of history. Almost as soon as she'd learned to read Nancy would pore over the heirloom book its copperplate written by gimballed lantern in the dark watches, imagine herself there on Lieutenant Richards' ship, in the Admiral's fleet.
The step on the stairs, that always-squeaky floorboard were the creak of ship's timbers, the knock of spars. All night she lay at anchor hove-to with Gwenny in the sagging double bed. A hammock. It swayed gently with the soft swell of their breath. Oak Cottage, ship of the line.
Branches shook in the breeze, the rigging swayed. She thought of the tars atop in crow's-nest and ratlines; the straining sails, the proud array of flags. But the powder-monkeys were her age, darting between juddering guns, avoiding the recoil, mad with the clamour closed between low decks, the battle's heat and stink. And then the tattered cheer from smoke-tight throats that stung with salt to hear how Nelson fell.
In the shipwreck of Dadda's death, the logbook foundered, went down with all hands when Oak Cottage was cleared.
Late again. He heard her key fumble, heels clack, nosed her perfume through the halitus of the workshop. She said it clung. Always used too much scent. Now he gagged at the reek she brought in
of stale smoke, flat beer, sour sweat. Life, she called it. The beat of dance-music still glazed her eyes, rimmed with black stuff; her dress clung, exposing her shape. He felt defiled, to think
of those other eyes licking at her. So, smiling, he embraced her. Rigid, the point slid voluptuously between the bones of her neck. She quivered and was still. He withdrew;
wiped the blade clean. Then gently bathed away the cloying vanilla smell of her face-powder, a smear of plum-juice from her lips, that fly-trap of spun sugar out of her hair.
Cleansed, she was his again. Should he forgive? His heart thudded like a drumbeat, but his hand was steady as ever. The scalpel drew its first fine line down her whiteness.
Tenderly he began to disrobe her. Now at last his skill was potent to keep her at his side. Her remorse could not move him, no matter how the red skull wept. He was pitiless.
Her skin clung to him; he put it aside. Sharp as a knife his need drove him through to her core. Never since Adam's rib had man and woman known such intimacy.
His hands sleeked her bones, polished them with breath, spittle, semen. Naked he triumphed in her utter nudity. Then rose, began to reconstruct their lives.
He wired joints, forbidding dancing. Over the frame he shaped padding to his own hands. He cupped her breast, her haunch, privately. Closer than those dresses, and all for him. He had made supple her skin
with borax. Formaldehyde would have served her right, the things she'd said about the smell; but that was for heavier hides. He eased her back into her covering, smoothing up from extremities
as though dressing her in silk stockings. His thread was fine as a hair, needle his slenderest curve. As for his art, that surpassed itself. And she was wholly his at last. He sat and smiled
at her. She gazed back. The glassy stare reminded him of that night. There were other girls. Prodigious skill twitched in his hands. He craved to feel again that bone-deep consummation.
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