Helen Palmer
red light jam
sugar is the hottest emotion,
but if I burn my tongue
the sweetness will be worth it.
one day you stick a spoon
into my spokes and we make
jam on the pavement.
we taste dark crimsons together
and every time your mouth spits
out a seed you split apart
my pomegranate head
a little further,
but please go on,
spatter me across the concrete,
play fast and loose with
my cutlery and my heart.
years later, dusty rows of jars
will line the cupboard shelf
sealed tight,
dark light enclosed.
bank holiday swimming
city man strides in, chilled flesh pimpling,
casting off: heel-smartness,
neat desk paraphernalia,
netted blue skies in meeting rooms,
all now submerged in this dark opacity
one entire surface a freezing silent mouth
which swallows and suspends
first limbs, then organs,
so coldly vital it pricks like love
city man lowers white balding skull
into ripple-pooled blackness
then straightaway back up and shatters the surface,
panic-spitting: water-lollops back to land,
spluttering-shuddering
a kind of entire-body scream,
a prayer of disturbance and apology
to the alien lowtide heaped-upness of things
and the magnified glare of non-belonging.
Alice and Leibniz (a love song)
You be Alice, I’ll be Leibniz,
then I’ll be Alice, you be Leibniz,
girl stretching beyond the girl
and exquisite man of numbers and letters
I’ll be old, you’ll be tall,
I’ll be young, you’ll be small,
we’ll peer through long
grasses and swish Victorian skirts
With manners so polite and so uncouth
we’ll shout obscenities in perfect Latin,
objects and substances answering back
crossly in unfamiliar tongues
We’ll each stand on scales and jump
up and down to upset the balance,
laugh as we run as fast as we can
getting nowhere over treadmill ground,
and dividing the quality of our motion
by the mass of our imperfect bodies
We’ll feel ourselves extend
beyond our dimensions,
frown when our dresses are too tight,
stare when the mirror no longer represents who we are
We’ll meet strange creatures and compare God’s image
to each flimsy piece of card with its talking shapes,
test each coloured substance, walk in its world for a second
we’ll measure degrees and forms of perfection
using caterpillars as rulers
we’ll test our limbs, straighten our jackets,
untangle and comb our senses
towards clear, distinct and infinite perception
And in our minds we’ll build a house
so texturally complex,
lit from the outside in,
sealed and full of tiny lantern beings
monads in x-ray spex
lemmings bathing in their own dark
soft yellow glow and hum,
omniscient loved-up prisoners
unperturbed by daylight’s glare.
play
we scratch through tangled
brambles with clam fingers, nettles
licking ankles and tongues
jabbing other tongues in
ritual machinic solemnity,
breathing in the sour air,
hop-skipping over sleepers,
ignoring the sweaty balloon
above us, the thundercloud
not yet burst, whilst we shout
and bang against the sharp,
precise edges of our world
years later we brush through
the pulsing strands of a jellyfish
night with nicotine fingers
biting to maim,
objects of spite leering
inversely to the ebb and flow
of ingestion and expulsion
zinging from ricochet bruises
of self-denying love,
the smudged edges of our bodies
splitting their overripe skins
as we melt into pools of
the whale-yearn ache that surrounds us
still now the feeling of dirty
unease at the mouth
of the muddy stream,
still now the seasick upside-down
rope-swing launch
and lurch into gut-mouth-heart, and yet
still knowing now the harder we fall
the more our organs bounce like rubber
Helen Palmer is a lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (Bloomsbury, 2014) and is currently writing a book called Queer Defamiliarization.
