The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem

by Jeremy Noel-Tod

  In April 1979, I was ten years old.

  This is a short talk about vectors. It’s about Brueghel’s Icarus. It’s about a girl walking home from school at the exact moment her neighbour laces up his Doc Martens, tight. It’s about a partial and irrelevant nudity. It’s about the novel as a form that processes the part of a scene that doesn’t function as an image, but as the depleted, yet still livid mixture of materials that a race riot is made from. Think of the sky. Think of the clear April day with its cardigans and late afternoon rain shower. Think of the indigo sky lowering over London like a lid. Think of Blair Peach, the anti-racism campaigner and recent emigrant from New Zealand, who will die before this day is out.

  Think about a cyborg to get to the immigrant.

  Think of a colony. Think of the red and white daikon radishes in a tilted box on the pavement outside Dokal and Sons, on the corner of Uxbridge Road and Lansbury Drive. Think of the road, which here we call asphalt: there, it is bitty. It is a dark silver with milky oil seams. A patch up job, Labour still in power, but not for long. It’s 1979, St. George’s Day, and the Far Right has decided to have its annual meeting in a council-run meeting hall in Southall, Middlesex, a London suburb in which it would be rare – nauseating – to see a white face.

  To see anyone, actually. Everyone’s indoors. Everyone can tell what’s coming. It’s not a riot, at this point, but a simple protest in an outlying area of London, an immigrant suburb: a banlieue. Everyone knows to board the glass up, draw the curtains and lie down. Lie down between the hand-sewn quilts shipped from India in a crate then covered in an outer cotton case stitched to the padding with a fine pink thread. The quilts smell of an antiseptic powder, an anti-fungal, Mars. We lie down beneath the blankets in front of the fire. It’s 1979, so there’s a small gas fire and a waist-high fridge, where we keep our milk and our bread and our cheese, right there, in the living room. It’s 1979, and so I live in Hayes, though in two months, we’ll put our house on the market and move.

  Move away. As would you.

  Bhanu Kapil (2015)

  ‘There were barnacles …’

  Once there were … – Cormac McCarthy

  There were barnacles that marked the edges of oceans. Late scramblers on the rocks could feel their calcic ridges stoving sharply underfoot. The wet rocks glittered beneath and in the wind they smelled of verdigris. The barnacles fused in intricate settlements. For their whole lives they cleaved, and in turn the fragile rock cleaved to them. Volcanoes and thimbles and strange constellations. Together they mapped distant cities and willed the sea to overtake them. And when the russet tide came they opened themselves like unfamiliar lovers. The whole thing some actinic principle: a forest grew up in a second, to grace a world where the sun was a watery lamp. Where none had been before, white mouths frilled softly in the current and squat armour issued forth the unlikeliest of cilia: transparent, lightly haired, cherishing each updraft as, feathered, they moved with it. They only existed for that half-sunk terrain. And as they briefly lived, those tender quills wrote of their mystery.

  Sarah Howe (2015)

  from Letter Against the Firmament

  I know. I’d been hoping to spare you any further musings I might have had on the nature of Iain Duncan Smith, that talking claw. But perhaps we’re at a point now where we need to define him, to recite and describe, occupy his constellations. Because to recite the stations of the being of Iain Duncan Smith, as if they were a string of joy-beads, and they are, would be to recite the history of the law, if we take that law to be something as simple as a mouth is, and each noise, each syllable that emits from that mouth is only ever and never more than the sound of animals eating each other, a gap in the senses where the invisible universe goes to die, and we become like ghosts or insomniacs stumbling through the city, we become the music of Iain Duncan Smith, his origin in the chaos of animals and plants, of rocks and metals and the countless earths, where over and again he breaks children’s teeth with gravel-stones, covers them with ashes. Because to classify those stations, the cancer-ladder of the dreams of Iain Duncan Smith might, at a push, be to consume him, and to define those stations, those marks on the hide of Iain Duncan Smith, might be to trap him, to press granite to the roof of his mouth, the stations of the law. And at this point, obviously, I really wish I could think of something to say that was hopeful, that was useful, that was not simply a net of rats blocking the force of the sun, till it crawls on its fists and knees, screaming like a motherfucker, sarcastic and wrathful, boiling the mountains as if they were scars, laughing, laughing like a crucifixion, modular and bleached. Bleached with the guts of Iain Duncan Smith, of each of the modest number of words he actually understands, such as grovel and stingray and throat, chlamydia, wart. And those five words are the entirety of the senses of Iain Duncan Smith, the gates to his city, his recitation of the germs of the law, a clock that never strikes and never stops, where we are not counted, wiped from the knots of statistics, comparable to fine gold, receptacles of song, shrieking gulls. It’s all I can bear to listen to, that shrieking. It blocks out the stars, the malevolent alphabet he’s been proposing.

  Sean Bonney (2015)

  from Citizen: An American Lyric

  When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among pillows. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor.

  The route is often associative. You smell good. You are twelve attending Sts. Philip and James School on White Plains Road and the girl sitting in the seat behind asks you to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have written. Sister Evelyn is in the habit of taping the 100s and the failing grades to the coat closet doors. The girl is Catholic with waist-length brown hair. You can’t remember her name: Mary? Catherine?

  You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person.

  Sister Evelyn never figures out your arrangement perhaps because you never turn around to copy Mary Catherine’s answers. Sister Evelyn must think these two girls think a lot alike or she cares less about cheating and more about humiliation or she never actually saw you sitting there.

  *

  The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.

  At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?

  It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.

  I am so sorry, so, so sorry.

  *

  A friend writes of the numbing effects of humming and it returns you to your own sigh. It’s no longer audible. You’ve grown into it. Some call it aging – an internalized liquid smoke blurring ordinary ache.

  Just this morning another, What did he say?

  Come on, get back in the car. Your partner wants to face off with a mouth and who knows what handheld objects the other vehicle carries.

  Trayvon Martin’s name sounds from the car radio a dozen times each half hour. You pull your love back into the seat because though no one seems to be chasing you, the justice system has other plans
.

  Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on.

  Despite the air-conditioning you pull the button back and the window slides down into its door-sleeve. A breeze touches your cheek. As something should.

  Claudia Rankine (2014)

  My Funeral

  Remove any remaining teeth which still have amalgam fillings, and dispose of them in a hazardous waste facility. Cast a rectangular coffin in inch-thick magnesium, 6 feet by 3 feet by 2 feet, total surface area approx. 19,700 square inches, the equivalent of 409 A5 pages. Use letter punches to stamp the inner and outer surfaces of the coffin with the text of this book, and of the Poésies of Stéphane Mallarmé. Pour a layer of white granulated sugar into the coffin, to a depth of half the difference between the interior height of the coffin and the thickness of my corpse. Lay my corpse on its back, fully dressed, on the sugar. Place an Elrathia kingii trilobite, free of all matrix, over each of my eyes; an enrolled Phacops rana trilobite in my navel, under my shirt; and the large, testicles-shaped fragment of mediaeval masonry you will find among my personal effects, over my genital area, with the balls pointing down. Put the polished section of Madagascan ammonite I always carry with me into my left-hand trouser pocket. Lay two small canisters of oxygen, and two small canisters of propane gas, beside my corpse, one of each on either side. Fill up the remaining volume of the coffin with powdered ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and figure out how to hermetically seal a magnesium coffin. Lay the coffin on a pyre of sustainable Scottish oak wood, built wherever seems most appropriate and constructive to you at the time. Invite everyone. Light the pyre. Run away. Don’t actually do this.

  Peter Manson (2014)

  Flower, Quartet, Mask

  To dignify a room needs no more than unusual attention to the usual. The corner of a glass table with the CD case lying on it, the orchid above still flowering after six months. It’s as though a challenge has been issued to time itself. The bronze face of a girl in sleep or ecstasy makes no comment upon the competing efforts of these things to behave as if they could control time. The orchid’s petals, like pink propellers frozen in a downwards plunge, a suspended cataclysm, have dared to endure; the music, whose case it is, has moved away on its own, as if to expend itself. One is still, one enlarged. Yet only one is growing unpredictably; the other knows its direction and directions. Does it matter? Both are doomed. Each outwits regulation for the time it takes, and for what time takes from it. The laser will eventually have nothing left spinning to decode, and the stalk will cease to transmit the life that qualifies stillness in the veined blush of the flower. Only the bronze face is content to be measured by time. Her eyes are narrowed, and her slight smile suspends all clocks. Sharing this for the moment that I drain my glass, I reflect that the page is no partisan. Everything has some claim upon it equally. They were all set upon their courses, and must see them through. The page woos them, but they make no response other than to be themselves. Eventually the page apologises, and is silent.

  John Fuller (2014)

  Reclaiming a Beloved City

  I approach Nairobi, thrown into the mass of old avenues. I have a map of the old town and what the streets used to be called, government road and the little place where Lord Delamere liked to be the asshole, all regards to the dead.

  And in the eyes of people are azaleas blooming and popping like bubblegum carried up to perch in the branches of a blue I&M tree, there where the transmission has been telling us consumption begins and ends when our bodies decide. We are lapping against each other, our bodies not touching, our intentions quite clear, our beds unmade.

  A naiad, completely given up to sighs and biting its fingernails, winks at me. I am the inconsolable. She gives me back a second of my celebratory youth.

  I am not approached by beggars although to feel at home my eyes beg for some reprieve from the eyes of another traveler who has misplaced his airplane in the middle of the street where it is okay to hold the arms of a stranger until you have crossed the road.

  In the old streets I besiege a man to translate the poems on the walls, on the bodies of women, on the lumps that are hanging from their men. Gross desire is a river tapestry with water like ribbons – he tells me.

  Clifton Gachagua (2014)

  Imagined Sons 9: Greek Salad

  For a week I travel on business, and on the fourth afternoon, I go to a restaurant to have yet another meal alone. I order a Greek salad and read a Dickens novel to escape my loneliness.

  When the salad arrives, I barely look. How will Jenny Wren respond to news of her drunken father’s death? I push the fork into the lettuce, and it yields slowly to the tines. The balance of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, with the sweetness of the red lettuce, is perfect, and I pause, relishing the flavour.

  I hear the smallest of shrieks. I think I must have anticipated Jenny, that I must have been that engrossed, when I hear it again. I put my book down so its open pages press the plastic tablecloth and keep my place, and my fork dives again, spearing a cube of feta.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ The sound rises from the salad.

  ‘Who – what are you?’ I whisper. ‘Where are you?’

  A black olive wiggles atop a romaine leaf, as though to wave. ‘I am your son, brutally transformed!’

  I glance around the restaurant and see the other diners, all in groups, engaged in conversation. ‘When I last saw you, you were an infant. How did you get into this state?’ I say with some sharpness.

  I think I see him cringe. Meekly, he says, ‘I fell in love with the virgin mistress of the god’s own olive grove. When I made love to her, I was turned into an olive tree!’

  ‘When you made love to her?’

  The softest of whispers: ‘They say, when I raped her.’

  ‘So you are a tree as well as this olive?’ I ask, trying to move my mouth as little as possible as I see the waiter coming from the kitchen. ‘So she tends to you, there in the grove?’

  ‘She only knows I disappeared,’ the olive whines. ‘She tends to me, yes, but without thought, without love. It is a fate worse than –’

  ‘Delicious,’ I say to the waiter, swallowing the small olive whole. ‘Just delicious.’

  Carrie Etter (2014)

  Place Name

  Flog Man, for them days when man could get nine-and-thirty just cause he hold his head so high that Missus call him uppity. Nigger man admit he sometimes feel the curl of whips, their stinging S’s – tips soaked in horse piss – more than he feel sun on his skin. Flogging was so common it was odd that they call this place Flog Man, why not rename the whole damn country Flog Island? But it had one beating so brutal, no one could cork their ears from it; both black and white man fail in the long practice of deafness; years pass; like salve but they was still hearing it, the cow whip flicking up flecks of skin, and this Mandingo man who they did think was too big, too proud to ever let eye water grace him eye was bawling out a bruck-spirit sound even larger than the barrel of him chest. Blood did sprinkle the ground like anointing and now people walk by and cringe as memory curl like S and lash them owna skin.

  Kei Miller (2014)

  Rape Joke

  The rape joke is that you were nineteen years old.

  The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.

  The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

  Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. ‘Ahhhh,’ it thinks. ‘Yes. A goatee.’

  No offense.

  The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word interesting, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.

  Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.

  The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine co
olers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.

  The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.

  Not you!

  The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.

  He wasn’t threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.

  The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.

  How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.

  The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee’s house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.

  The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.

  OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.

  Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.

  The rape joke is he called wrestling ‘a soap opera for men.’ Men love drama too, he assured you.

  The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass’s My Century, which he never even tried to read.

  It gets funnier.

  The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.

  The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said ‘he didn’t have those urges when he looked at her anymore,’ not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!