My Work
My Interview with Robert Graham
LESSONS FOR LOVERS OF POETS Can we dress this up in metaphor, wrap silk scarves of similes around us? Perhaps leave me hanging in drips of ellipses - maps of erogenous zones tracing goose bumps like dot to dot colouring books; kids fun for adult lovers. Tongue pushing commas - intermission, breath for pausing, kisses alluring me. Alliterate me into flick, flirting furious, fumbling. Keep me guessing. Please, please, keep my interest - question marks around my neck. Don't let me guess. Hold my presence with exclamation marks skipping from my breasts. Underline your intention beneath my hips. Highlight your needs with your lips. Acronym your pleas inside of me. Pinprick pupils dilate From full-stops; calligraphy for the open-minded. We can scribe a future- present from all of this. Lists of others, torn and shredded. Destroyed as if they never existed. Soften me with sonnets and I will toughen you with slang. Slip in random half-rhymes that roll straight off your tongue... But don't split us in half with semi-colons, separate beginnings too short. Don't leave too many pauses... Please, please finish your sentences as you first intended. Don't finger-flick quotation marks before you speak, and if you dive in deep, don't let go until you know you can correction-fluid your way back out. Acrostic lust in light tongue touches Licks Under Silken Thighs Syllable count your foreplay in iambic pentameter verse. Keep the rhythm strong but keep the melody light. Leave the paraphrasing to someone else. And never leave sight of how I might wind-up writing this scenario out.
SUPPLEMENTS The flowers sent for me, he received - found pint glasses to turn into vases, cut the stems under running water, like my mother, on our wedding anniversary, showed him to prolong their short and wilting life. This time, in preparation for when I could face the stairs and linger between our uncomfortable walls, damp with the stale lilies neither of us wanted; to stain our sideboards with the disintegrated stamens I left untouched in fear I might appear sliced with bitterness by cutting prematurely. I left the blood-orange dust to settle amongst the spine-creased ante-natal books he never had a chance to read. I told him not to answer the door, said I deserved privacy and space; everyone would know what I’d been through. I needed clean sheets, sanitary pads, arnica bath salts and vitamins: A, B complexities, C, D and E the vital minerals I left him to Google-know-how and online shop for. The list grew and grew. What was screen-clear was his abhorrence to any further reminders of dying. His life became reflected in naked living room windows of Sky sports, bottles of unopened champagne, empty pizza boxes and too many wilting petals. For him, there was no hiding, even in the spare room. Sometimes, I came down, to clutch my belly, show my pale face and ask if it was not too much trouble to put his shoes on to drive out for food. I wore my dressing gown and forgot to wash my hair. These norms were pointless, I would say, when I couldn’t even bear to leave the house. Neighbours came most nights with their left-over dinner wrapped in silver foil on spare plates, like we had lost everything. We gained more washing-up, pressure for gratitude, wilting flowers with tiny hole-punched cards of condolence. No-one thought to bring artificial plants complete with vases – ones that never die And no-one came to remove the stench of stale waters, or stay to talk to him about lighter stuff or ask him to join them for a beer. And I never thought to ask, how much his shoulders ached, with the burden of everyone else’s efforts.
LEGO HOUSE I build a Lego house on her short-changed breasts – small disruption to the pieces of green and red, red and green stuck on top of one another stacked over and over until my skinny fingers hunting through the box deafens us and I am plucked from the warm patch of blue hospital blanket and told to say, ‘Goodbye. ‘ Afterwards, we stand outside the rain pelting like war. I pretend not to notice Mother’s tears beneath the last-minute umbrella. The bus stops and I ask, ‘Is Granny dead?’ She turns away from me and pays our fare.
BLACK SHEEP I remember almost as if it were just yesterday; the smell of wild garlic hanging in the damp air and the inspiration for new words, drying up like summer’s morning dew. I had exhausted the last few crumbles of flapjack and scraped the remnants of large-dog faeces from the heel treads of my all-terrains with the spiky corner of the poly-urethane wrapper. ‘The Psychology of Environmentalism’ – It sounded promising, if I could see it through… I had words, abstract sentences even - though they clung to nothing but hypotheses; ‘redefining our understanding, as information-processing creatures, of the terms nature and environment…’ Yes, that sounded credible. I liked beginnings, they always offered something hopeful. I think he must have seen me first. ‘Careful’ he said ‘you’ve a toggle caught.’ I pulled at my coat and watched as the olive green woven rope snaked back through the lining of the hood. ‘Fuck it!’ I cursed as I snaggled my way over the kissing-gate, the offending branch of bramble tearing through my ponytail. ‘You’ll never thread that back through’ he deduced, shaking his head. ‘Yes. I know that!’ I snapped back, stuffing the toggle in to my pocket ‘Such a bitch when that happens,’ he added, empathetically ‘And how the hell would you know that?’ I stared in to one of his dark, beady eyes ‘I see stuff around here – lots of stuff’ he sighed again, this time with a waft of arrogance, ‘I see how stuff goes’ I wedged my hands back in to my pockets and fiddled with the stainless steel ends of the toggle. Dick-head, I thought, supercilious dick-head. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so difficult to thread it back through – if I could find the patience. I walked on through the long grass, my left ankle buckling at the edge of a hardened cow-pat. Self-consciousness whipped through me like October wind. ‘Where are you off to?’ I could feel his breath at the back of my knees. I pretended I hadn’t heard him. I’m thinking, ‘The coalition of distinctive fields of cognitive, evolutionary and social psychology.. .’ ‘I say!’ he called again, ‘Where are you off to?’ ‘Nowhere - Just walking’ I quickened my pace. His presence was beginning to irritate me – I had things to do, a paper to write, not wasting time on some creepy underling. ‘You must be going somewhere’ he pressed on, a hint of annoyance almost palpable. Christ! This one had some issues – didn’t he have a home to go to, a family, somebody else to bother? Ha! Perhaps they were sick of him too. I could understand that! ‘No’ I dismissed, hoping to kill the communication dead. ‘Well, where have you been then?’ ‘What’s it to you?’ I was beginning to feel hassled and vaguely under threat. He caught the back of my heel and a spike of adrenalin shot through me. I felt irritation and fear all at once ‘I just like to know, that’s all. It helps me to build up a picture’ He remained unperturbed by my aggravation and his reasoning suddenly felt sincere - almost heartfelt. ‘A picture of what?’ I slowed up and allowed him at my side. Slow down and you can listen. The memory of my Father’s words clung to me like humidity. ‘A picture of my life, of course!’ he snortled, ‘for I am nothing but my surroundings’ ‘That’s ridiculous!’ I cried, my voice pitching high across the soft July sunlight. A startled thrush pivoted the branches overhead, ‘you’re just a sheep!’ ‘Says you’ He replied, his left eye scanning the length of my rucksack, ‘have you any nibbles in there?’ ‘I had a flapjack’ I replied, pushing with my tongue a flake of honeyed oat from the crevice of a porcelain crown, ‘but I ate it all’ ‘All of it?’ He leant forward and scanned the bag for clues. I felt greedy and ashamed. ‘It wasn’t that big… I, I didn’t know I could have shared it…’ My voice trailed as I mourned the loss of that potential moment of solidarity and camaraderie. ‘That’s a shame’ he hung his head low with disappointment, ‘I love flapjacks.’ ‘I could bring you one next time!’ My pulse quickened with anticipation, ‘if you like?’ ‘Don’t bother’ he lamented, ‘it won’t be the same next time.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know’ I brightened, ‘I could bring a feast, it could be fun!’ I could see myself now, packing a small Tupperware container with flapjack and biscuits, maybe even shortbread. Everyone loves shortbread! ‘No. It won’t do’ He lifted his front knee to catch a tear from the end of his long nose. ‘The expectation will ruin it. I was hoping for something more… more spur of the moment.’ His hoof wavered above the long grass, in vain anticipation that I could pull things back. ‘I see what you mean’ I pondered, ‘well, perhaps you might have some nibbles?’ I forced the positivity in to my suggestion. ‘Hmm. I like your thinking’ he ruminated for a moment, his tears drying with a gust of hope. ‘There’s just this though – if it’s not too predictable’ and he bent his head low to munch from the grass at my feet. ‘Oh’ I hesitated, trying to hide my reticence with a tiny smile, ‘I’m not too sure.’ He looked up, one eye on my face, the other at the kissing gate where we’d met and his mouth, a splendid display of Summer green. ‘I’ve got this paper to write and well, I have to think of something new. It’s hard work and I’m really stuck.’ He nodded. ‘Besides’ I added, ‘I don’t much like to eat things straight off the floor.’
Hannah Teasdale takes her narrator on a walk in the country:
Black Sheep, written by Hannah Teasdale, read by Caroline Garland
Mr Wayne Bobbit by Hannah Teasdale, read by Oliver Langdon
​Inspired by the true story of the Bobbits, Mr Bobbit’s point of view.
Mrs Lorena Bobbit by Hannah Teasdale, read by Caroline Garland
​Now, Mrs Bobbit’s point of view.
THE BOBBITS IN NARRATIVE BY HANNAH TEASDALE It is late July. A thunderstorm breaks the suffocating Virginian humidity; breathing space at last. Drivers stop dead in their tracks, cocooned in tin shelters, under liquid fire. You watch from the open window and offer your palms towards the blackened skies, washing your hands of their filthy day. Steam rises from the smouldering pavement below. It is another damp night. Isolation and frustration gnaw at the space where your stomach ends and your lungs begin. Inhaling, the buckle of your jeans pluck at the swell of belly hair. Regret at the passing by of degenerative months of self-indulgence is quickly replaced by apportioning blame. The breath falls out of you again; torrential outpour. Rubber blades frantically swipe across the windscreen as the traffic dissolves in to a liquid mirror over the tarmac. Your plans drown with them. You go to bed alone, before midnight. A bedside lamp splays beams of light above your bed – illuminating the pearly strands of a spider’s web framing your breathless wedding day. You drift to sleep as the coffee-stained pages of Haispungo close around your fingers. The door of the late-club swings open in the wind; smoke hanging from the spotlights and clinging to the cleavage of swaths of female faces - pale skin and disappointed mouths. Whisky – short and straight at the only free stool at the bar. And four more until the young pairs of eyes feel more like magnets, than knives. You allow them to take your loose change and last few cigarettes in return for the echo of a lingering hand on your heavy thigh. The engine refuses to turn so you wade back through the highway and then fall next to her, drenched in discontent. She shrugs your desire and feigns ignorance in her dreams. You cannot go unnoticed and a while passes through white noise. You know she used to love you and you need her to feel how much you still do. She just needs reminding. Then you wake; his breath at the back of your neck, putrid from dimly-lit hours drenched in Jack Daniels and Marlboro Reds. You feel him hard against you pushing himself in to the crease of your buttocks. You turn on to your clenched belly and bury your face in to the pillow; an endeavour to find some distance from the damp contours of his swollen frame. His bulging blue eyes snake-like in their sockets, his skin pale and clammy; he stinks of perfume not yours. He says he’s been out – drunk, strippers, sluts, bitches, whores, drunk… He needs you, his own filthy cunt and he knows you to understand. He catches your wrists and fifteen knuckles knot above your head. You feel her tears on the back of your hand and there is nothing you can do now but hope that she has remembered how things used to be. Later, you stand alone. You take a blade from the dim light of the refrigerator and slide your thumb across the gleaming steel. Memories come back to you - refracted - those lonely nights of agony and shame, of sometimes, the quiet teasing of his permission - the gentle touch of your own hand - until inadequacy took possession and jealousy forced control. But now he lies; satisfied and unaware of your cold hands - flaccid, spent and impotent, until you allow him to become what he deserves. There is more time, time that passes through you in stomach-churning waves. The room is hot like she has left a thousand kettles to boil in the corner of the room. And then there is a coldness across the bones of your pelvis and she is standing beside you and there are hundreds of words between you - but you cannot hear them above the screaming. She turns to run and doors slam all around you as she leaves you to drain away from yourself. And then, after the slamming is over and the coldness has turned to fire, they come and tear through wooden panels and wrap you tightly in a crisp new beginning. As the unforgivable spills to every corner of the bed, you take your piece of him with you through the twilight mist. From the open window you thrust him to the blurring hedgerows below and offering your palms to the skies once more, you pray for the rains to come again and wash you of him one more time. But now the air is still and silent as it clings around your blood-stained skin.
LITTLE SECRETS a flash fiction by Hannah M. Teasdale There was finality; our big lives boxed in small cardboard panels – sealed tight with Gaffer tape. You always said that packaging tape was for little people to pack their little lives – not strong enough to hold together such a life as ours. I lined the length of the house; front to back with sealed boxes – each one packed as a snapshot of our world. I filled the last one with the contents of your bedside table: The books I wistfully bought for Christmas – spines remained unbroken, an envelope full of tiny teeth and wisps of new-born hair, Ventolin for those frosty mornings, Anti-histamines for those suffocating nights, the tiny videotape of our dirty weekend in Salisbury, the vibrator we tired of after a rainy weekend on Exmoor fifteen years later. I closed the cardboard flaps into one another and stretched the silver tape across the middle before clutching the memories across my heart. I know you wouldn’t have been surprised as the little secrets of our big life lay strewn across the floor for the underside I had left unbound and the flaps released like a trap door. There was never a time when I had missed you more.
Hudson Corridor
Catching breath; thin, wincing pain of slit skin
headed out of the seat. Other things were normal.
A phrase he’d heard on his cell phone: ‘Everything was flight’.
Eyes burning, partway, straight ahead to the view: a scene
of clear imagining how he had accidently been cut.
He thought of something long forgotten:
Shia boys on the battlefield, trenches, re-doubts,
enemy mouths and red bandanas, his head again.
Recite your soul straight. Towers, long silhouettes, figures,
material things, ancestors pull clothes tightly before death.
In seconds, a blast wave sent him into a wall. The floor
began to slide, he saw a chair bounce the length of the corridor.
Slow motion.
The ceiling, the lift and ripple, other things:
smaller objects drifting. A shift in the basic
arrangements of parts and elements.
The lean felt forever.
He felt debris come and go, forgetting to feel stupid
in voices going the wrong way. Trickling from the corner,
like bile, the limited view of morning sky.
White powder noise, glass shivered, a snatch and lift.
Is this, he wondered, like half an eye staring, was what he smelled:
the old man, a woman’s shoe, a briefcase, the stairwell?
In the long wait, he took one step
into the thunderhead of smoke, into seeping,
stunned distance, the light-drained dead. That’s where everything
was falling away, residue he could not name. One step
and then the next, motion everywhere
hands in the air, losing shoes and money,
like running to catch a bus.
Poetry Sculpt from the final chapter of DeLillo’s ‘Falling Man’
Using the power of visual image and telling detail where language links the consciousness of knowledge and understanding in an inexplicable environment.
Can you remind me
what I did last year? Christmas in particular
when my life still feels littered,
a spatter of graffiti but mostly
it’s just litter.
I can’t remember.
Or I don’t want to.
Which is it? do you think? Do you even think
It matters? I do recall my linen – my body bound
so tightly like a present
no one could unwrap. They passed that parcel.
It’s layers soiled, sticky
somehow not something to be touched.
They said, it’s a little late to the party – we’ll put it down
to the weather. We were told it was found,
between here and home.
Lost. Picked up by the temps on the advent round.
They had to drag it, they said. But it didn’t seem to mind.
When it wakes, we’ll tell the others
the bruises were there when it was found.
We signed for it.
After all.
Allegedly, the neighbour says,
it was expected for Halloween. Until the mix-up,
when they had to bridge the transition.
​
One Leg
Let me show you my room
Filled with toys, my favourite book about a unicorn
That when I pull the covers
Over my head, becomes my palace
Where I’m the Princess.
And then there’s my doll who’s lost her leg.
Let me show you my room
Filled with mess – I can’t find the favourite book
About the unicorn and the covers
Have been taken from my bed. I’m not
A princess now, I’m a nurse. But there’s one thing
That has stayed the same: my doll who’s lost her leg.
Let me show you my bus
Filled with people I don’t know
I found my book about the unicorn and read it
To a man in uniform I’d never met
He said I was still a princess but I want
To be a soldier now
I miss my doll who’s lost her leg.
Let me show you my tent
Filled with bags and noise and dust
I have to share my book about the unicorn, my bed
Creaks and when I pull the sheet
Above my head, I am sad
Because I can’t find my palace
Perhaps the doll with one leg now wears the crown.
Let me show you my new house
Filled with everything I don’t know
I have a new favourite book
About a fairy and I can pull the covers
Above my head and I am in my old house
And still the me that lived there
Still holding my doll who’s lost her leg.