What we are up to

Girl Guide

28/03/09
by Emma Hammond

i was never a girl guide and
brownies was
for losers-
i had my own club,
it was the 'kiss my slug
none of you cunts can join' club,
and only me and the omnipods
were allowed in.

our cookery badge was mud in water patties
and fern lick bits of
dried clay,
in a sauce of marshmallow charcoal spray
or- crunchy darkling fresh shrimp brulee
which we sold door to door in packets, tied
with gobstring & hedgehog spikes
NO ONE got away.

i was in a league of my own with my
deadcow bones and granny's jewellery
hidden in the split-to-bits tree,
drawing god as a fat man
telescope hard and probing-
i had him under control within the hour
there was no contest,
a slug on each shoulder and he buckled
like a girl.

skimming the frothy horses sick
from the river with a spatula to take
to the air-raid shelter,
mixing it up with the vole skin silk,
talking to each other in spastic voices-
those were the days my friend no fret
or this silence crept up after sex,
our
science badge
the little mice in traps wriggling
pin-eye done for
mauled by the teeth
and those larger ones for badgers-
MOTHERFUCKERS that took your leg off.

a vague notion then that my fat man
was a sweat-drop farmer in a lumberjack shirt,
screaming red-faced and grunting
as the last drop was squeezed out,
the rosettes jostling in display for dressage
while a sad shotgun-grease wife
up to the elbows in chickenspit giblets
packed the stuffing in.

it was all so very cold.
those whirlies flipping
on the just-ploughed field
coughing and that squeaking
in the air under their shells,
lobster-loud in the pink tea-time sky...
there were tears and a whinny
someone shouting my friends
back into their boxes.

there were worlds within the fire
my stragglywet hair in coils around
the goosebumps,
a sense of horror and my sister hovered
in her brown uniform-
a lightning bolt of yellow wrapped round her neck,
and silence such as you have never heard
as they untied the barbed wire from my thigh.


COMMENTS

    • Anonymous

    i like this poem. how do you remember all the words?