WE MAY ALL BE KILLED
“I suppose it starts to happen first in the suburbs…people starting to come apart.”
—Shirley Jackson, ‘Pillar of Salt’
Kirk house is still empty I see, poor front border guzzled by furze and lions. did you know them? sure, you must have been round their barbeque once. their boy ran for county, always belting around. his father was cross-country two counties over before the labyrinthitis. 24 and giddy as a still-wet calf. it’s a shame, and you know Mrs was his sweetheart at school, stood cheering by the track on wet Saturdays with cold spaghetti hair, so when the old balance you know, gave out, well they tried to carry on, but you ask me it’s like old grey underpant elastic by then can’t wind it back can’t tighten it. they really did cook the best ribs on that dented old terrace. I’d give my real eyes for a rib right now you hear the news? the facility. got out, one of them secure? there’s science for you. those things can get through any gap bigger than say, a stamp like jelly. like thinking jelly and we can lock the gates, clunk bolts, arm alarms all we like. we all have holes somewhere. you forget just how what’s the word? poor. porous. how porous we are.
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ALCATHOE BAT
Madness balls up, forces its way out chest first,
and stretches fleshily in the air. In the same way,
the once-mad themselves emerge. First as a bulb
wrapped in leaves, swelling from the labial gnarls
of a tree nook, then blossoming into fur and fine
elfpurse leather. Birthing a jumbled head, its
snubby bean nose reaching up past pips of eyes,
framed by soft mussel shells. A wriggle and gone.
In its place another muddy droplet forms, filling
the rough, mossy portal, powering up. Then more,
pausing, yawning thorn-fringed mouths to read
secrets, greetings swirling like banquets of flies.
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KIRSTEN IRVING is one half of the team behind cult hand-made magazine Fuselit and collaborative poetry press Sidekick Books. Her pamphlet, What To Do, was released in 2011 by Happenstance Press and her debut collection, Never Never Never Come Back, was published in 2012 by Salt Publishing. She won the Live Canon poetry prize in 2011 and currently works as a freelance copywriter and proofreader with the collective Copy That.
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Read more by Kirsten Irving:
Author webpage
One more Kirsten Irving poem in B O D Y