O Pioneers! (after Willa Cather)

We travelled to the wild West
Midlands, chugging through
 
cooling tower canyons in the
turquoise Ford Triumph that
 
Dad had bought for fifty quid,
onto the new house behind
 
the concrete factory. It was still
the right side of Rickerscote Road,
 
where, Mum said, the cuffies lived,
with brown settees, half-cladding
 
like unfinished Scrabble, and kids
who ran around with their arses
 
hanging out. They called our new
house ‘the Jesus house’; it had a flat
 
roof like the bread loaf buildings they’d
seen in pictures of Jerusalem, stuck into
 
The Children’s Good News Bible
like commemorative stamps.
 
On my first day of the new school
they pushed me onto a dogshit-
 
spotted verge and told me to fuck off.
Mum and Dad got the bathroom done
 
on HP, but not a shower, as that was
just chucking water down the drain,
 
and even though Barbara Foster
had one with gold-plated taps,
 
she also had highlights every month,
and bubble-effect double-glazing,
 
and that was common. We had
no carpet downstairs, pampas grass
 
in the back garden like a bulgy emu,
uniforms from Penkridge Market,
 
joints from Bejam’s on a Sunday.
In Art we were told to make a
 
model of ‘your house’ out of clay.
I cut five cool slices, squadged
 
them together like a Jamaica cake.
The teacher didn’t believe it
 
was really our house, said to do it
again. So I quiffed the roof
 
into a triangle, pressed pennies
against the windows, attached
 
Scrabble pieces up one side
like a climbing ivy of squares,
 
and moved our cuffy arses into
the frontier, where we belonged.

Sarah Barnsley

published in Envoi 155, February 2010, 34-35, ISSN 0013-9394

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The domestic white-throated Lincoln imp lizard (familia albigularis)

Distant relatives
of the iguana,
they have dwelt
in this dank corner
 
of the Midlands
for several millennia.
They were here
before the Romans,
 
the coaching inns,
the highwaymen,
the ghost tours,
they pre-date
 
the cabbages,
the onions,
the creation of the
Lincolnshire sausage.
 
They have seen it all
and they have seen you,
coming up the path with
your London ways
 
like untied shoelaces,
your university education
splatted in your hair
like pigeon shit.
 
Their tongues have
exceptional reach,
capable of snaring
a small child which
 
they can take years
to digest. Visitors
should exercise caution.
Do not bang on the glass.

Sarah Barnsley

published in Magma 46, Spring 2010, 36, ISSN 1352-9269

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Slow Ships

The snail is love’s compass
sunken in Atlantic gardens;

its spiral-needle squeezes out
concentric bulbs of shell

like a fawny toothpaste,
pointing to a love that winds

onwards and beyond view, past
the giddy headlands of its apex.

The snail’s gummy body sucks
the blue evening ground as we

pass by, leaving glitter-dew
trails where love had once been.

New love is nearly lost as you kick
snails deep into flowerbeds where

they come to rest, then slowly move
off like barges slipping rope,

galleons on the horizon coming to
sack the harbour of your cooled heart

Sarah Barnsley

published in Mslexia, 33, April 2007, ISBN 977-1-4739390-1-2

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Three States

I.      Liquid

Had been washed up –

we had come by ragged boat,
cutting our hands on the sea,

pushing our faces further
against the walls of night and sleep,

looking out for cracked mussels
and starfish on the shore, their glimmer

and half-lights to guide us in
towards where we would wake.

Between sand and air dropped the morning,
falling free and easy, full of substance,

solid and gas at the same time,
a blanket of cold across the beach.

We took it by the corners and
dragged it around our shoulders and
marched inland wearing the day.

II.      Solid

Coming upon a plain, marked in places
by olive trees, their crooked arms pointing us

out and onwards, we were covered by the
heated layers of the August morning,

baked slowly like clay bricks, our noon
shadows peeling topsoil, grating mineral –

                  meeting heat and shadow,
                                  feeling the edges and
                  letting go, honey and milk
                                 washing away, pouring out
                   jugs of sunlight before us –

We fumbled at the handles and carried it back
across broken land, spilling ourselves over the light.

III.      Gas

We returned to our ragged boat at night,
with amber fists and molten faces dissolving

into sea like dust into water, with zinc-white
hot shoulders melting under a split full moon,

its circle broken by ashen cloud like
a bright dinner plate smashed in two –

Bodies full of holes, sunlight fast shooting
out of us like bullets, we had woken and lived:

floating Chinese lanterns leaking fire

Sarah Barnsley

published in anthology, Sometimes, 2006,
Gwynned: Cinnamon Press,ISBN 1-905614-04-7

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