Amy Key’s Luxe

© Image by Travis Elborough

 
 
Amy Key was born in Dover and grew up in Kent and the North East. She now lives and works in London. She co-edits the online journal Poems in Which. Her pamphlet Instead of Stars was published by Tall Lighthouse in 2009, and her first collection, Luxe, was recently published by Salt. Amy is currently editing a new anthology of poems on female friendship Best Friends Forever, due from the Emma Press in November.
 
 
 
 
 
 
“Luxe (Salt Publishing, 2013) is a magnificent spree in a bric-a-brac shop. A haul of pre-loved and glittering objets – pralines in a crystal bowl, a handful of tame ladybirds, a portrait in vinyl and cola-cubes – are artfully displayed on the poems’ shelves to represent the conflicts and connections of a fabulous circle of friends and lovers, those real, remembered and imagined.”
 
 
 
* 
 
 
 
“”Layer your pulse/ onto my pulse,” she writes in ‘Brand New Lover’. “Dress me.” Only the reader knows if this is an order, an instruction or the sweetest sort of invitation. Read a copy of Luxe, keep it next to your fainting couch.”

– Julia Bird
 
 
 
“This delicious selection is a chocolate-box assortment of the work of one of my favourite poets writing today. Her delicate, dextrous writing belies the raw truths she tells. There are many centres to her confections that only reveal themselves when you take a bite. In her words “Poem with peep toes … Poem to conceal some feelings in … Poem to avalanche in your heart”. I love Amy Key.”

– Lauren Laverne
 
 
 
“If we are living in the material world, I want Amy Key to be my material girl. She makes her pleats and flounces move; she crowds the surface with colour and texture right where it needs to be to draw the reader in like a bee to the velvet bell of the foxglove; or like the silverscreen beauty who eats bonbons from a satin box, she wills our gaze to take it all in and to crave more. These poems are worn on the body, and like all great ensembles, they show just enough; they are hot and memorable.”

– D.A. Powell
 
 
 

© Image by Martine Charalambou

 
 
You Ought To Be In Pictures
 
 
In my depression the energy goes everywhere. It’s diffused. And where it’s intense it’s in very short bursts. Enough to scrub the bathroom or change the sheets. Enough to write a poem. My book is as though I pressed play and record each time I had a burst.

Last night I posted lines from my iPhone notes disguised as Twitter and Facebook status updates to see if any of them stuck.

I read someone else’s poetry for the first time and worry that my book will be perceived as being derivative of their book.

Someone asks “What is your poetry about?” I am embarrassed and say “me” but I mean “being a woman”, I think. But then I really mean “my experience of being a woman”. Later I wonder if what I really mean is “what I want my experience of being a woman to be, distress included”. I’d asked the poet Kate Kilalea to read my book and respond to it. She said:

“Aside from all their purely poetic elements, what strikes me most about Amy’s poems is the kind of idea of woman-ness which they work with. It feels like what is happening is a kind of valorisation – as oppose to eroticisation – of feminine vulnerability, which is different from what I’ve seen before.”

This was an important moment for me. An embracing of the woman-ness. After all I had the comment “I can see why girls like your poems” ringing in my ears.

My poetry is endless recalibration of experience.

My poetry is a way of mind-mapping my insecurities.

It’s all mood board.
 
 
 
 
 
 
I’m struck by what Steve Roggenbuck says in his essay ‘toward a more flowing culture’:

“i want to be your poet … i want to inspire you and talk to you. in many cases, I really want to be your friend.”

This idea of friendship compels me.

In my poems am I trying to communicate more effectively with people in my life or who might be in it. To say “Look! I know I come across ‘this’ way, but here is something else I want to share”. This being able to talk without my physical persona intruding is something I need. There are so many ways into the truth of a person.
 
 
 
 
 
 
In the documentary Grey Gardens there is a scene where Little Edie performs to camera. She sings and dances to ‘You Ought To Be In Pictures’. I find this scene very touching. Little Edie is a star, but she’s no longer the ingénue, about to be discovered. In singing it she’s saying to the crew “Look at me. I could have been someone” but also “Tell me I still could be someone”. It’s the “Tell me I could still be someone” that affects me. In my poem ‘On Typing Paper Stolen From Her Employers She Proceeds To Evolve A Campaign’ I get at this idea:

          Hopes should recede with age but this isn’t
          a right seeming present!

          […]

          My imagined future is a collapsed soufflé.

Never far away from dancing to ‘True Blue’ in the kitchen a grown-up’s face on. Never far from singing into the cassette. Singing into the dark. Hopeful someone will say what a nice voice you have. Never far away from maybe making it.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Just as Alabama, the main character in Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me The Waltz, in her hopeless pursuit of ‘making it’ as a ballet dancer feels that:

“[in] reaching her goal…in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self – that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow”

I am my own delusional heroine. But I have to hope.
 
 
 
 
 
 
I am also forcing people to look at me. In my poem ‘Emotional State Seen Through A Pale-Haired Fringe’ I am, chronologically speaking, at the beginning of a deep depression. Unable to speak about it to anyone, just quietly falling apart, I write the poem where even:

          […] the at-boil kettle maddens the bully
 
          of your memory, and no one there to see it blow.

Is it that I’m terrified of no one seeing me live? Is that the role poetry is playing?

I’ve often wondered if I write poetry because I’m scared of dying. I fear I’ve been negligent of my own fortune.

          Inside I fritter soft as cinders.
 
 
 
 
 
 
One of the recurring images in my poetry is of the lost child. The much loved children’s book Where The Wild Things Are was made into a film a few years ago and I became obsessed with it. And heartbroken by it, by the isolation of the boy and his imagination. I began to write a series of poems, inspired by the film and by the soundtrack to the film, written and performed by Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The poems turned out as childhood memoir and in implicating my siblings I found I couldn’t finish them. One has made the book – Igloo – and in it I try to express the self-imposed, necessary isolation of the child:

          […] Instead of talk,
 
          we will have stronger thoughts.

This is both a resistance to talking – there are some things I cannot speak to the adults about but it is also a power I can have. The idea of having secrets that I can snap into being, like activating a glow stick appeals to me. The secret as super power and malevolent force.
 
 
 
 
 
 
I should really talk about love.

When I was in John Stammers’ group he asked me ‘what I wanted to be’. I told him I wanted to be ‘a great love poet’.

What I really meant was ‘I want to be loved’.

This was some years ago now. Truth is my experiences in and out of love haven’t been at all happy, but it seems to be all I can write about. Perhaps that’s the recalibration I mentioned earlier. A need to ‘right’ my love experience in poetry. In my poem ‘Your Year in Review’ I address myself:

          […] Your heart went rouge. Desire
          kept in a gold compact, fell loose of its casing. Powder
          went everywhere.

The sense that I make a mess of stuff can’t be escaped. But I lavish my attention on love less experienced, more felt. In absence of the grand, all-consuming Love Affair (in the presence of the paltry, ill-conceived ones) I act them out in poems. My nights pour into the absence of my One True Love. But I know:

          Even this crochet blanket won’t
          address the lack of requited laundry.

Really my ‘it would be better to be hurt than not have any love at all’ from my teenage diary is simply reworn as:

          […] rather a cupboard of cut-off ponytails than this! I want a life
          that warrants excessive exclamation!

I suspect all the poems are just an attempt to neutralise my self-image.
 
 
 

© Image by Rebecca Key

 
 
Brand New Lover
 
 
I’ve abandoned vanity, since I became a body
of pixels, never quite set, since you rippled
the apparent skin of me.

I’m all texture. Silk rosette, billowing coral,
tentative as a just baked cake. Sensations
slide over my knitted blood.

My mouth is a glass paperweight
to keep our tastes in, like maraschino
cherries and water from a zinc cup.

This is not about a future
with a decorative child. Layer your pulse
onto my pulse. Dress me.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
To A Clothes Rail
 
 
Dress folded as an envelope and posted to me
Hand-me-down dress taken up, then taken down again
The one worn once, to a party
Age-appropriate dress
Dress the colour of your skin long underwater
Margot dress, Marianne dress, Marie-Antionette dress
Paper dress, never worn, purely decorative
Dress employed as stand-in
Silk dress with scenes from Labyrinth
Pattern for a dress, unmade
Dress embroidered with every song I’ve ever loved
Pinafore that comes with caveats
Two sizes too small dress, bought for its primrose
One last seen doing the hula down the precinct
Shift once worn in a dream
Dress as though assembled from vegetable peelings
Woodland dress in the style of a fawn
Poppy-print shirtwaist, won in a tombola
Dress for slow-dancing to ‘Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)’
Fancy dress in want of a petticoat
Cocktail-drinking dress, un-sittable-down in
Dress best worn with brutalist pendant
Smock to bring to mind a meadow
Old-fashioned dress in crepe with self-covered belt
Little black dresses (numerous)
Acid light projections dress for crazing the eyes
Formal wear gown for selling on eBay
Dress bought for funeral, frequently worn to detach from death
Dress last worn when someone cried for you
Fretful dress, to be cut up for rags
Palladium dress for looking into mirrors in
A cake of a dress – whipped to frou-frou
Scented dress of mustard seed, orange peel and almond milk
Glitter-bellied hummingbird dress
Ex-favourite dress, now not quite right
Perfectly acceptable dress, given the circumstances
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Emotional State Seen Through A Pale-Haired Fringe
 
 
Dawn is coloured sweet pea and warbles with birds.
From bed, you notice how dust garlands

your fake yellow roses, but what now could
be gained by licking them clean? You could

plan menus, polish the mirrors, call your mother
and sweep the yard. Cleanliness, if not calm

in your reach. But, storm sultry, you lack
resources for comfort: the last velvet sleep;

legitimate wretchedness.
Others tell you, I too have felt alone.

Imagine them, teary on the sofa or wrenched
in the bathtub, all their wishes declined.

And then your own confines of lonesomeness,
where the at-boil kettle maddens the bully

of your memory, and no one there to see it blow.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
We Should Be Very Sorry If There Was No Rain
 
For Sarah Crewe
 
 
I mention lately I’ve lacked a honeyed mood,
delicates have evaded me. Again I’ve spent too much
trying to ornamentally tile my life. The sofa’s worn
down where I always sit and though my diary’s
clogging up I don’t know how to project.
I am ashamed to want a someone. Social
engagements are propelled by wine,
as unease goes up, eyeliner goes on. Sometimes
I imagine you in your kitchen, stirring soup.
Sometimes I make broth and pretend it will work.
Darling, it seems there’s no awning
to shelter under. Or perhaps I’m under the awning
unable to step out. Someone might cake crumb
a path for me but it doesn’t do to rely on others
to ice your day. I can see the dead roses
are as pretty as the live, appliqué
sleep to my brittle concerns. I have an aspiration
you will recognise my handwriting, in time.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Igloo (Where the Wild Things Are)
 
 
When it is cold enough to slice the snow
we’ll build an igloo and we will live in it.
The igloo will be like a poached egg,
the snow dome hiding a hot yolk. We will grow

sharper teeth and bedtimes will be later.
I will be cook and you will make fire.
I have stolen sausages from mum
and this will do us for tea. There is a story

I can tell at night of a runaway child
and you will ask if it’s you. We have
two brothers, but they never let us take charge.
No one will know we are in the igloo,

but we’ll find a way of telling we’re safe.
Your best friend will be a bird and mine
will be a deer. The bird will bring us berries
and the deer will guard the door. Instead of talk,

we will have stronger thoughts. Our skin
will morph into something more warm. In summer,
we’ll make bricks of mud to dry in the sun.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
High Voltage
 
 
Just as I woke, you stomped into my head
and I thought of everything that makes me admire you:
not just your sass and nerve (although
it does deserve an explicit mention ), but how
Neverland it is to spend time with you, like a pop-up theme park –
each day abundant with vivid wants,

like how you’re era-less, confident as a portrait,
inconsolably hungry, you talk easy as an adult –
seems even your glamour isn’t at the top of my list,
admiration being such an intimate reckoning of a

friend. If I can’t say it now, when?
Oh, there’s nothing ordinary about decadent warmth
real as foxgloves and glow sticks and winter birds,
did I tell you how much I want you to dance with me?
 
 
 
From Luxe (Salt Publishing, 2013).
 
Order Luxe here, here or here.
 
Visit Amy at Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat.
 
Read ‘Here, For Your Amusement’ and ‘”Too Gruesome!” at The Quietus.

Protest Against Rape: Wednesday * May be triggering *

Before the reader embarks on reading these poems, the editors stress that some content may be found disturbing, troubling or even distressing. Sexual violence is an emotive subject, and some writing about rape is as exploitative as the crime itself. Such writing in the context of politics, the media or literature can constitute a “double violation” for the rape survivor who lives the experience for a second time: the experience of “triggering”. Encounters with sexual violence as a subject for literature demand caution, care and respect, but an interrogation of “rape myths” is necessary. The poems selected break the silence of the status-quo, which defines sexual violence as a freak event rather than part of a dominative “rape culture”. This protest is the beginning of a conversation that seeks recuperation, healing and redress.
 
Please note that submissions are closed.
 
The introduction to our protest can be read here.
 
Please refer to our list of International Resources for Rape Support here. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Now That I Have Daughters
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
 
 
Don’t get me wrong, I was always a feminist.
How could I be otherwise?
But now I’m raising daughters it all seems to leap out at me,
and by it I mean the twelve-foot murals at the fairground
of women: breasts bulging, thighs narrow, backs arched, red pouts.
I’m sure I always noticed them but now,
as I take my girls on those rides, I am angry because
a spin in a pink mouse-themed cup subjects them to a message
of womanhood as coterminous with sex and subservience
and a pervasive annihilation of their true power,
true beauty of the female edited out by capitalist ink.
And it’s there when I wheel the pushchair into a newsagent’s
and dash out again, for at my four-year-old’s eye level
magazines flash those same bimbo-fied babes, naked, slicked,
twisted in poses of the seductress,
the same on billboards or posters for alcopops, movies, apps –
anything to trade the masculine as dominant, as master. My oldest
brushes the hair of her princess dolls, wears a tiara
and writes little stories about becoming a princess,
and this I don’t mind. We talk about
what a princess represents, her qualities
of self-worth, integrity, what femininity really is.
Then she asks me to read one of her fairy tale books,
but I cringe at the self-sacrificing narratives of female-as-
secondary, as helpless – and one day I can’t stop myself,
I pull out all her books and discard the ones
I cannot bring myself to narrate. Yes,
I may have become a curmudgeon.
I may well be over-protecting, censoring, radical.
But I say if I must raise my girls in a world where rape
is joked about, warfare, legal,
where a child my daughter’s age will be forced to marry,
where a woman will be put in prison for reporting a rape,
where a mother will be thrown off a bus for breastfeeding,
where the press will vilify a woman for not losing baby weight
and applaud a man for misogyny,
then I will raise my girls by teaching them that they are awesome,
they are daughters of the divine, that their femininity is sacred.
And I say take back your messages of harm and woman-as-
nothingness, take your whispers toward me in my raincoat
pushing the buggy, take back the qualifier
in that disgusting phrase, just-a-mother.
I say, these are my daughters, they are glorious, they are precious,
and they know their worth.
                                       I say, watch out.
These are the women of tomorrow’s world.
 
 
 

© Naomi Woddis

 
 
Landmarks
Jane Commane
 
 
Our geographies are different,
Pierced by landmarks like this;
Secluded lanes, alleyways, parks,
emptying train carriages, taxi cabs,
stairwells, public toilets, almost all
open spaces when unaccompanied.
 
Then, those other landscapes of threat;
working late alone, short-cuts home,
the party where the first drink swipes
your running feet from under you,
the stranger or the friend you trusted.
 
It can happen almost anywhere.
And too often, it does.
We fold up this tattooed map of threats,
carry it everywhere we go.
 
 
 
 
 
Boot Carnage
Meg Tuite
 
 
Alone in my car at a stoplight.
Owl Liquor store, the only beacon on an otherwise four-way corner
of tangled vacant ghosts between sky and bone.

Drivers stare through each other from the safety
of windshields
when the girl crosses the street.
Air is still. July transfixed in swelter.

The girl’s body wires on a decline
no wind outside her.
A mini-skirt bares bruises,
spindly legs pack into combat boots.
Black cracked magnificence.
Boots haunt and bleed many orbits.

She sneers at cars lined up on either side,
spits at windshields.
Thrusts her head back,
shoots white spitballs into the air between us,
one after another, as if they were fists.

Somewhere defiance
stomps its kickass boots
smacking cement
a fear I decipher,
a compass point.

Alone on a street in Uptown.
4 AM and truancy is palpable.
Men line up, lean against buildings,
drip leer-bullets like semen.
A masturbation on every strung out crack face.
They click their tongues
hoot at my scrawny limbs,
hone into my tremoring head
through blood-clot eyes.

I just left the hospital.
A girl has been raped.
I held her hand for hours while she shook
through legs in stirrups, detectives
whose eyes were cast on her breasts
as though they were answering the questions.

When I get back on the street
those rabid men don’t know these boots
are loaded with dynamite
could take out the entire block.

Cement crushes beneath me,
I grind through each one
of their crotch-grabbing threats.

and with every step they diminish,
as though behind a windshield,
I watch them disappear
in my rearview mirror.
 
 
 

© Wayne Holloway-Smith

 
 
The Apple
Rethabile Masilo
 
 
When young summer rains
have washed our sheets
by the river, hung them in the wind
to dry, and yanked them tight
over the edges again, then swept them flat
with an outstretched hand—that’s when
I like to get it on with you; yet even sex
has somehow left us wanting,
so that the orchard appears to fruit
how pillage does to love. They are people
of aggression, my Lord, who spend
their time reaping the undergrowth
as if Eve had never offered her apple
openly to Adam first, inviting his snake
to partake of her harvest, with this blessing—
this apple we shall share at love’s meetings.
Objection, your Honour! (Objection overruled!)
In Eden, everywhere between limbs is fruit
watered with good water. Red ones
the size of Mecca, small ones with a small
tang, bigger ones, of the loins
and of the loom, made from stamen and pistil,
mangoes with the fever for a mouth
just hanging out at the pool in the sun.
There is a buffet in the afternoon
where the horn of plenty has spilled.
And when the mission bell rings
and we head to church ironed-out
and starched like sheets, our clothes
are a tropical basket of fruit, some of it
ripe enough to burst at a touch
into tears that may not be of joy,
young fruit with no particular root
to look to but the earth beneath us.
Truth is, without the core’s consent
nothing should ever take place. Peach
or apricot or the wild berries that grow
behind the village spring, who will, when
the time comes, take the message of this day
into consideration? When I walked
out of Pioneer Mall in Maseru last night
a man lifted a sign at me, held it at the flow
of after-dinner traffic: fuck rape, it said
in cursive and deliberate characters.
 
 
 

© Amy Key

 
 
The day after
Pippa Little
 
 
I am invisible.
Nobody would know, nobody will know,
my friend says. She runs her hand down
over my head, says
I am clean now.

What used to be my voice
but haywire,
a wolf clawing at a door,
tells her no,
red sobs erupting through my skin.
 
 
 

© Malgorzata Lazarek

 
 
After the Attack
Carrie Etter
 
 
I hinge one of my ribs
to either side of the doorway.
I stir my father’s muscles into mortar.
I carry my mother’s eyes in my palm
to set in stone above the entrance.

I am building a house for Joanna, my youngest sister,
designed to protect her.
I regret its late construction—
I had thought, She is only thirteen,
believing she had a few more years of safety.

I walk to the nearest hill and look back.
There is no house, there is no sanctuary.
There are bricks I want to heft.
There is a sharpened pole
where I want to place his head.
 
 
 
Published in The Beloit Poetry Journal.
Reproduced with the author’s permission.
 
 
 
 
 
 
blue rubber mat
Mathew Staunton
 
 
past a staff room
and the office
of the principal

a boy drags
a blue rubber mat

out into the playground
where St Joseph
guards the cars

a boy drags
a blue rubber mat

through the gaping entranceway
and up two flights
of stairs

a boy drags
a blue rubber mat

past his teachers
and another open
staff room door

a boy drags
a blue rubber mat

and once the classroom door is closed
he lays the place he will be raped
upon the floor
 
 
 

© Cassandra Gordon-Harris, ‘Yellow Leaves’
Oil painting

 
 
Wallpaper
Terry Ann Thaxton
 
 
Purple hills and green houses run
together in the wallpaper around my room. My daddy
runs his hands down, gliding over the cut

edges where they join with paste. The paste holds
down my tongue. Do you like it? I swallow so daddy’s
princess can exist. Stare over hills into darkness
beyond green houses
where people live happily
where purple hills are not bruises
where little girls laugh. No daddy

loves his princess more; he buys wallpaper. Mommy
sees the edges peel, superglues them down so no one
sees. It’s silly to have wallpaper like that, why
did you ask for it anyway? I did not
ask for it—I drop my head, close my eyes. Inside
my head crowds of people run away
with me to the other side of the room and wait
in the corner

under the window, ready to throw
our weightless bodies out in to the purple hills,
ready to stay away for a long time—all night
if we have to. Princess will know when it’s time
to return. When daddy leaves her

alone again. When he tells her to forget.
It’s important to be quiet. Do you like it?
nodaddynodaddyidont
 
 
 
Published in Getaway Girl (Salt Publishing, 2011).
Reproduced with the author’s permission.
 
 
 

© Josephine Corcoran

 
 
Unconvincing (underlined)
Josephine Corcoran
 
 
My mother didn’t die when I was twelve
Someone’s husband never said
We can give her a home
I never found myself alone with him
Inside my bed
My head
Was always full of fancy
I would have failed regardless
Whatever did, or didn’t, happen
The day before the test
 
 
 
 
 
 
Memory Grill
Paul Hawkins
 
 
The noise I hear when bacon fries is the hard pop and scratch of vinyl; Elvis or Jagger jumping out of the speakers into my ears, I recall the clumsy moon-steps of Neil Armstrong in zero gravity, Mohammed Ali having no quarrel with them VC; the taste of a digestive biscuit dunked in tea. But then there was no ‘Love Me Tender’ in the room lit by that black & white TV, just your insisting hips thrusting and you forcing yourself into me.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Coat
Martin Figura
 
 
Give me your tobacco coat
and black hat, father. Sink
into the cracked leather chair.

Let’s have a good look at you:
your white shins and loose teeth,
your monkish bald patch.

Let’s go through the photographs,
those ridiculous fictions
stuck down in albums.

Who’s this and this, I don’t
remember them. Your hands
seem a little shaky old man,

be careful with your tea. Tell me
the truth this time. We can take it
to the scrubby end of the garden,

not mind the sodden leaves,
look out across the stubbled field
to the roosting rooks.
 
 
 

© Naomi Woddis

 
 
Evil Eye
Camellia Ann Cressey
 
 
To her, the oblong rubber was magical.
A little rub, and all her multiplication errors
and spelling mistakes would disappear.
She harvested the flimsy rubber shavings
in her blouse pocket to make pretend
snow for her dolls at home. Each day
she went to the girls’ toilets and rinsed
her rubber in cold water to wipe away
granite smears and grubby fingerprints.
In Maths, a pupil stabbed her rubber
with a pencil, the lead breaking
and wedging deep inside. She cried
until the teacher observed that the prick
looked like an eye. She skipped home,
excited to give her Barbies a snowy surprise.

She was surprised to find the kitchen door open
and even more surprised to see Daddy
who’d been away for ages, pulling
his jeans up over his bare bottom
and Mummy on the floor with her eyes closed,
blood dribbling from her mouth.
She licked her rubber and scrubbed it frantically
across her forehead, but the image wouldn’t rub away.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Best Eaten Cold
Valerie Morton
 
 
Behind me at the freezer section,
his hands round my waist tightening

as he whispers “We’ve missed you –
it’s been so long”. He doesn’t know

I know what she spilled onto my lap
one day after school. My best friend’s

husband – her best friend’s father.
At first it was simple – report him, kill him,

smash his face in – but it would be her word
against his and he hadn’t gone “all the way”.

This is it –

in a flash I bring up the frozen peas,
crash the solid pack against his cheek,

watch the weals rise, red and angry –
that’s for my daughter.
 
 
 

Vanessa Daou © Image by Tyann Sells

 
 
Save Yourself
Vanessa Daou
 
 
Running away from things that don’t hypnotize you
Spinning in circles when you cry
Something inside you always turns against yourself
While everyone out there knows how to be the hero

Can’t you save yourself just like everybody else?

Forever’s a state of mind you like to put yourself in
So you go to the movies to believe in things again
You make a religion reading comic strips
So you’ll learn how to die with a smile

Can’t you save yourself just like everybody else?
 
 
 
Lyrics from the album Joe Sent Me © Daou Records
Reproduced with the author’s permission.

Amy Key: Six Poems

  
 
 
 
Amy Key’s pamphlet Instead of Stars is published by Tall Lighthouse. Her work has been published in magazines and various anthologies, most recently in Birdbook (Sidekick Books) and Clinic II (Clinic). She co-hosts The Shuffle reading series at London’s Poetry Café. She enjoys collecting clutter.
  
 
 
 
*
  
 
 
 
Capsize
 
 
I wanted to go to the bottom of the sea
in the drop-net we bought to catch edible
crabs. I had thoughts like the sea bed in soft,
but soft like a bed, so you’re not afraid,
that a shoal of black and white fish
– waitresses – will swim around me
and think me strange. But then I had
other thoughts like how might I breathe
and will the net line break? Then the net
became a pod and I had to wear a mask
but then the sea bed wasn’t soft and all the fish swam away.
 
 
 
 
‘Capsize’ is from a series of poems based on the film
Where The Wild Things Are.
 
 
 
 
*
  
 
 
 
Poem to Chelsey
 
 
He made me cry like a girl denied pink bunting
          Left my crockery lustrous with butter
          Watched my school-flirt cartwheels
          Ate the heads of nasturtiums
          Said ‘ruin yourself with these, honey’
          Let his doggy off the leash
          Sang bawdy at the cream tea
          Pushed me over in the daisies
          Mistook my toenails for diamantes
          Stuck his tongue into the Swiss cheese
          Put his linen in the chiller
          Knotted the leash to my ankle
          Wrote I’m sorry in white petals
          Poured cheap brandy on the bite marks
          Had a thing for leatherette
          Rubbed against the hydrant
          Allowed the dog to chew the leash
          Cheerled dances in the bathtub
          Shot the Pepsi off the ledge
He liked me to wear the gold anklet
          Milked it for all he was worth.
 
 
 

‘Poem to Chelsey’ was commissioned for a tribute to
Chelsey Minnis.
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
 
His is a Mystery of Cooling Towers
 
 
          demolitions and algae.
Oh suitor, thunder me
          your elegant curse. Mobbed,
I will magic us to Siberian igloos
          where lamps bleed a glow
into our symmetrical clinch.
          Or a late shadowed terrace –
cool tumbles of liquor, a hand-painted parasol –
          balmy with glossy austerity.
And though I will admit I was a squeeze
          more drunk than you (given my rabble
of stunted views), I hold dear these inventions;
          last night, after the third time
I noted my wine glass wanting, leaning close
          and whispering my cheek
with mushroom-gill lashes, you murmured
          You, are a very nice girl. 
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
 
The Susceptible Heart
 
 
Nothing to be done about the sky, its early fall.
You give me match-strike, candelabra, chandelier.
This year, autumn doesn’t matter.
                                        If lit by dawn,
my mind will clamour to recall how our kiss left off,
how the evening’s talk – steeped in dramatics – set off
that wordless flourish. But tonight pours
into your absence. Take this half of ale,
sipped with one eye on your tastes and just now
my fringe swept away with your imagined hand.
Our romance, tracked by a fling of mill-town
horns, an elementary fiction of sweethearts.
  
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
 
With You
 
 
     for Rebecca Key
 
 
The fish gurgle in their outer space light –
I ask “pass me the blanket” and the wineglass
residues are violet and look back at us, like pupils.
 
To-do lists cascade from the fridge.
Your to-do lists are often niche catalogue orders.
We both eat showy pralines. Alternately, you eat
                                                       the lychees.
 
When you’re distracted I like to hide my finger
in the core of your best ringlet. Upstairs the bath
lies empty and I can’t but think bath oils and towelling.
 
I harvest garden moss and set it on the floorboards.
The garden is flung with a camouflage of twilights.
We turn the lights down and sit on the moss bed,
 
compare photos of our favourite light fittings.
If you do me a pedicure, I’ll do you a manicure.
Your eating of the lychees suggests the extent
 
of your gentleness. My favourite: Hotel Kiev;
yours, in this living room. I choose to breathe
in the space between your breaths.
 
We’ve declined all other atmospheres:
the room turns aquarium. We sit back,
tune into deep-sea light shows.
 
Your eyes fill in with yet more green. Once
you sat by my bed until you knew I was dreaming.
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
 
Tight Dress
 
 
I’m in the tight dress. The one that prevents dignified sitting.
The tight dress suggests I’m prepared to be undressed.
Do my thighs flash through the seams?
I try to remember if the bed is made, or unmade.
The wind is wrapping up the sound of our kissing.
I wonder should I undress first or should you undress first.
I’m not sure I can take off the dress in a way that looks good.
I consider if I should save up sex until morning.
We are far gone and I’m better at kissing when sober.
I find that your earlobes provide the current fascination.
On my bedside table are three glasses of water
                                          and my favourite love letter.
I try to untie your shoes in a way that is appalling.
 
 
 
 
 
‘His is a Mystery of Cooling Towers’, ‘The Susceptible Heart’,
‘With You’ and ‘Tight Dress’ are published in Instead of Stars
(Tall Lighthouse, 2009).
 
Order Instead of Stars.
 
Read more of Amy’s poetry.
 
Read Amy’s article ‘How to Put On a Poetry Gig’ at Young Poets Network.
 
 
 
 
*