The wrong room

I really like this. Although… I’m not quite sure that I understand it.
 
But in a way that doesn’t matter. I mean, we don’t have to understand everything, do we?
 
No of course – I like being made to think. And I love the way he’s used the ‘e’ sounds – E and c.
 
Keeps the rhyme to a minimum… very clever.
 
It’s so economical – yet there’s quite a lot to take in. Maybe you could have a line break somewhere, instead of punctuation? That ‘equals’ doesn’t add anything, does it?
 
Yes, that would work. Take out the equals and have no punctuation at all, you mean?
 
The more you read this the more you see in it. I just wonder if you really need –
 
Actually, I wasn’t sure about the rhyme. Thought it was maybe a bit – obvious. I wondered if you could change one of those letters to something non-rhyming? Tone it down a bit.
 
Not the c though. That’s a really lovely allusion, to the sea. Reminds me of Dover Beach.
 
Yes, and it’s the only concrete image, isn’t it? We need that to hold on to.
 
Oh, I must have misunderstood – I didn’t read it like that at all. I read it as ‘see’ – a bit of authorial intervention. ‘E = m, see.’
 
Well it can hold both those meanings, surely? Just one tiny niggle though – if you’re having a line break, won’t that make the next M a capital?
 
Oh no, leave it. It’s more modern, lower case.
 
My computer does capitals anyway. I’ve not worked out how to stop it.
 
That’s Microsoft for you. You should get a Mac.
 
Expensive way to get rid of capitals!
 
We used to have some lovely holidays, by the sea…
 
Er, can we get back to the poem? What does anyone think about the ending?
 
Good    ?
 
I liked it – but. Well, this is just nit-picking, but perhaps you could lose that last little bit? I mean, by the time we get there we all know it’s squared, don’t we? You don’t need to spell it out.
 
It was the start that bothered me more. That E feels a bit like padding – just getting into the subject. Wouldn’t it be stronger without it?
 
So take out the E, and the ending?
 
And the rhyme – and just have M, and maybe another letter that doesn’t rhyme.
 
Right! Time’s moving on.
 
No, just m – lower case.
 
OK. Anyone anything else for Albert?
 

Julia Deakin

first published in Acumen, 64, ISSN 0964-0304;
in collection Eleven Wonders, 2012, Graft Poetry, ISBN 978-0-9558400-5-0

 
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Kingfisher on a tram

After a while they start to annoy you
perched on every pondside information board,
common as unicorns,
 
so you add them to your life’s quests
and weekend treks to willowy pools
where a man in a cap has just seen one
just a minute ago
 
and you trek home having seen nothing
but a man in a cap
and you blame yourself for being bad
at looking until at last, at last
 
a whacking great blue bruiser
of a thing, scruffy as a brickie mixing cement
sits or rather stands a stone’s throw from you
long enough for you to believe in unicorns –
 
and years later thanks to this
you register the next split-second biro streak
along the grey canal past Matalan
 
that makes that instant click,
that vision lifelong, Meadowhall Elysian,
your tattooed ticket-girl an angel and your tram
a barge of burnished gold.
 

Julia Deakin

first published in Bridport Prize Anthology 2011, ISBN 978-1-9083260-8-9;
in collection Eleven Wonders, 2012, Graft Poetry, ISBN 978-0-9558400-5-0,

 
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Code

Dovebber, Jaduary ad Barch
the datiodal afflictiod bakes its rouds.
Wad grib afterdood you sedse
a cledched fist roud your epiglottis.
Baligd greblid, it hags id there
squeezig ad squeezig. Or baybe
you swallowed a dailbrush?
 
Do, you thindk, do – bore
like Hober Sibsod by the biddit.
I cad still breathe. You turd
the heatig up to baxibub, buscles achig
udtil dext bordig you fide
you’ve betaborphosed
idto a woolly babboth –
 
eyes streabig, dose ruddig,
gradba recobbeddig vitabid C
or baduka huddy. Feed a code, she dags
but you cad odely taste Barbite
ad TCP—there’s a cebedt bixer
codvedtiod id your siduses
ad dow your ears have god fuddy,
 
rushig ad gurglig like a Badhattad
sewer. Your braid turded to bush
you draba queed it, sdortig ad sdeezig
od the screed which idforbs you
you are cobbod. You have
dasopharydgitis, rhidopharydgitis,
acute coryza or a code:
 
ad idfectiod which affects pribarily
the dose…the bost frequedt disease
id hubads, the average adult codtracts
two to three addually. These idfectiods
have beed with hubadity sidce adtiquity.
There is do cure. You are biserable
as sid. You are hubad.
 

Julia Deakin

first published in Magma 66, ISSN 2514-3611;
in collection Sleepless, 2018, Valley Press,
ISBN 978-1-9124361-0-1

 
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Checkpoint

We come from hell. A history of short measures, rough justice,
public executions. Rules of thumb. From backs bent in fields,
mines and furnaces, we walked miles in rags through becks
clogged with debris, hitching lifts on carts down rutted tracks
or shut for days in cramped, smoky carriages on splintered slats
with cocky strangers leering legally,
                                                                            to cities ruled by horses
in the hands of drunks, the sound of klaxons, screeching,
oaths and tolling bells obscuring backstreet screams of birth,
crude amputations, barber dentists, TB wheezing up the stairs,
spit and spittoons everywhere, cataracts and goitres rampant,
fingers green with nicotine and ink, the tang of coins fished
from gutters, rivers heaving with the dead. Rain and slime
between our toes came with us into dim rooms close with soot
and sulphur, clogging nostrils picked for smuts flicked into rugs
thick with grit, chairs with dust and hair oil, privies cold
and wet or fetid, just vacated, hands from here unwashed
to hack food with a penknife used for fingernails and hooves
in kitchens home to cats, dogs, beetles, maggots, grubs in fruit
and slugs in greens at tables wiped with cloths boiled with kerchiefs,
bandages and nappies brought from bedrooms shared with mice,
bedbugs, nitcombs, pisspots, plaster peeling onto damp bolsters,
clammy sheets and memories of leeches, layings-out and wakes,
clothes seamed with sweat heaped souring in moth-filled closets
next to pictures over mould and trapped birds in chimney breasts
and hard soap scum in aluminium tubs of cooling water
fanned by draughts from grey net at the streaming windows,
springtails in the rotten frames and in the attic, books and papers
pulverised, riddled rafters, wasps’ nests, pigeon lime.
 
We’re here now. Gated, lighted. Vaccinated, regulated.
Vacuumed, smokeless, enzyme clean. It’s been
so long, like centuries.
 
Everything stank. Tanneries and pits and breath.
This is the past. Do not turn us back.
 

Julia Deakin

first published in collection Without a Dog, 2008, Graft Poetry,
ISBN 978-1-9124361-0-1 (out of print);
Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, 2013, ISSN 977-2-0488770-0-5

 
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