[Digital Poetics 4.9] Four Poems by Stuart McPherson
Image by Stuart McPherson
Red Meat Issue
Boats are red and fleshy as ridden.
Black water to red. Frothed by tooth,
by hand, by pernicious intellect.
Stony beaches, a cold shingle so
obtuse it clatters across the white cliffs.
Red livers glossed in morning light.
Like risen dough, like bitten tongue.
Of red seeping out of creases from an
indiscriminate raft sent from wound.
Suffused, full plum red, red mothers.
Our Fathers holding thornless stems.
Roses wettened and absent of colour.
Red carpets, silk ties. Sewage paper or
tabloid hammered fists. Torrid faces
wrinkled. Set alight as burnt hands
wrench raw forearm of sky, as witness.
We repeat, we repeat, we repeat, and all the
while sustenance is syphoned through
a hose until midnight streets are lined
with anaemic cadavers. We stretch out
in expanse, sat atop a puerile vomit
of distraction; a vented red rage. Pointed
finger; blame slung. All stars will collapse,
and in the forests of our twin earth red
wolves howl at a crimson moon.
It fills with gleeful manipulation. Thick
slabs of someone once defined as water or
someone badly drawn as thing pooled
in-between an infantile and arbitrary
definition. Bordered land; home bodies.
Faces on alert, red as enemy. Online recipe
search; how meat is easy to marinade, to
cook over hot coals. Crudely stripped
and loosened against our will. A blood
orange anchored in the depths is a red heart
sobbing to be kindly placed back inside the
vessel that it didn’t ask to be born into.
Gathered Expressionless Men
Crepuscular in transference; calculated.
The way you linger. An oil slick seabed
dragging down the wholesome light for
meticulous wringing of any living neck.
How you suck the marrow from baby pink
limbs, smack your lips, lick fingers as
fat rivulets outwards; gravied blooms of
celestial expansion. Ball joints wrenched
from socket, both in relocation and abject
terror. There you wait, sheet-like in the
treetops ready to blame a brisk wind for
the kidnap of every young, frail body.
To bag them up. For slop pouring beneath
thrones, to extrapolate, heighten those
repugnant seats above desolate shop level
eyelines. Sweep up every single piece of
frailty pressed between loving fingertips.
Parent and child. Drink dry the mother’s
milk, castrate the fathers, eviscerate elderly
relations atop tall pyres, observe from
country stables to warm the stud. Gallop fox
fields with clubs dripping in rich garnet
tendrils. To be savoured and licked, dropped
dangling into the dulled beaks of fattened
birds who will never fly the nest, or feel the air
underneath wings. Shake loose gold coins,
shatter pottery with truncheon raps. Install
ticketing on every spare inch of uncorrupted
natural beauty left unscorched. They stand in
front of us; their raw cracked commissures.
Unholy mouths unable to contain the worming
tentacles hidden beneath such velveteen cloth.
Zero Waste Manifesto Commitment
Work is important to us, so hoist a felled deer across your back.
It will spill its lifeblood and that is meaningful. How we build
a structure from all weight bearing dead animals; pangolin,
ostrich, iguana. Your discontent is a problem for you to solve.
In ablutions, cleanse yourself from the inside out. Those limp
feelings like a hog halved and tied by hoof. Iced water
spattering its diamond clouds refracted from hollowed
ribcage. Poor attitudes are bred inside the body. Yours is
flatlining, lazy as cider apples piled up to rot in some
unpleasant orchard. Visit the bleached slaughterhouse,
observe the laughing knives. Ghosts escape from windows
and we will catch them by their transparent edges, assess
them, put them to task until all souls fill our pockets.
Deliberate currencies are cloaked, hidden beneath the heavy
tan of roebuck pelt. Everything priceless held inside
membranous walls is sluiced out in a chemical bath.
Oh Glorious Bloodsport
Helplessness as fingers rasped along pearlescent
scales. To fillet. Small bodies silvering between
stones, long lipped under daylight; a promise of
nourishing things. The mouth appeal of fluorescent
flies, barbs pushed through skin. To be hit by shoe,
by shovel. Gasping at the language of our dreams
frothing from the guts, all glassy eyed & cataract
resplendent. We begin to rattle. They line the banks
in silhouette, fingers flaring out the gills as bones
are crushed & bowed by heel. The soft shoal flickers
like an eyelid. The lines go in. We lay before the sun
in the shadow of our death. Such prosperous laughter.
They cast out the curves through the slovenly air.
*
Stuart McPherson is a prize-winning poet and artist from the UK. Recent poems have appeared in Butcher’s Dog Magazine, Bath Magg, Poetry Wales, Anthropocene, Blackbox Manifold, Prelude and One Hand Clapping. A debut full length collection Obligate Carnivore was published by Broken Sleep Books in August 2022. In October 2022, Stuart was the winner of the Ambit Annual Poetry Competition. His second collection ‘End Ceremonies’ was published via Broken Sleep Books on August 31st 2023.
*
The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
