Lu Rose Cunningham: Three Poems
November, to Anne Carson (I)
Anne writes, at the border crossing all I could hear was your pulse. I write to the border crossing, wishing I could hear their pulse, my ear-bone a dry ravine transmitting no sound. Their wells are filled with dust and I feel mad to mourn here, my wells filled with water, the basin of sky overturned to feed the gardens; my sleep-nest waiting for me, warm and welcomed. But in this shelter removed, we are watched by men in chambers, far from the old language of comforts. Circulated utterances painted verdigris come, copper tinted blue. Cold, tarnished. We move with friction, worn/down/out/moving/still.
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November, to Anne Carson (II)
we - my gran, my growing love, my ex love, my to be loves - use words in a manner neurologists call word salad. I prepare and mix and jumble jargon in the salad bowl, appetite set to wane or gorge, balance unaccountable. Slow and lustre, to utterly reckless. Wanting to be saintly boy-child shuddering with feeling, or everyone’s burning image of desire. I want to be your boy slut, Anne writes. I want to be her/his/their slut, the friend-slut cradled like a hot water bottle without hedging bets, or stripped bare and plundered. Let me sit in your viscera. To talk of pleasure, to pleasure, to be inside another’s pleasure, but we crack from wild to quiet, and I feel neither saintly nor sultry (is their something I’m not getting?) listening to the other’s silence, flesh dry and searching. Love hungering.
I should have left days ago.
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(( ))
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The service asks what you wish to discuss.
I ask you to consider lethargies and then a history, repeating itself. Quiet, as if the air had swallowed all sound. The last time you saw her, orb lights over the moor. Ochre murk, the Longdendale Lights, heraldic of spirits or a passing.
Inscribing dirty writings into the land, descend towards nighttime, decoding the long hours. Pink light appears in the height, one crow finding another, murmurs translated in the grazing of wings, the sharpening of beak against cool stone, tones furrowing into surfaces.
Like the nightjar, living crepuscular, nocturnal. Close to the naked ground, concerned with the task of remembrance, of where we have been.
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Lu Rose Cunningham has written for and exhibited performances at Leeds Art Gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield, South London Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, and HuMBase, Stuttgart. She is the author of For Mary; Marie, Maria and Interval: House, Lover, Slippages, both published by Broken Sleep Books, the latter featuring in PN Review 2023.
