Ways of Seeing: the Enshrined
It felt like—
but that was where the problem began.
Let’s begin again.
Anyone can turn off their feelings.
Turning them on again—that’s the tricky part.
I wanted to miss my mother. I wanted to feel the sun once more.
Blood was a definition. Everything about her was red—
her womb, her lips, her nipples thick with life.
They say it’s only when you give birth that you understand.
I was hungry to feel something.
They couldn’t say my name,
as if saying it would draw them in too deep.
People hate that—don’t they?
He was different. That was the problem—
he wanted to say my name over and over again.
There was something chthonic about his obsession with naming.
He couldn’t watch from a distance. He had to have me,
where he could chew me up.
To swallow my diachronic semantic shift.
It’s not that my mother hadn’t warned me
but you can hide anything in food. Someone
fed too long on a diet of the obvious
will always fall for fruit.
And someone with a certain kind of mother
will believe swallowing constitutes a deal.
And so here I am again, in the sun
in bits, bleeding into the earth
with both ways of seeing
and my mother is still not satisfied.
If I Stop Being Angry
from Wolf Daughter
i
After the long years, the stoppered words
force the issues against the cork, flow
out through the narrow, graceless bottle neck.
I, an exhalation of re-oxygenated carbon,
explode onto ceilings, pour
down walls to the floor.
Will I be able to fight, run away, hide?
The wolf, his eyes flecked with nuggets of purple, gold,
green, amber––having seen the suffering of the world
knows each fragment for its worth––
has the measure of my scent.
I have felt his breath in the hairs behind my neck. He
says the words I have a right to my anger are the most
dangerous words in the world.
He pounced whilst I hesitated
and he swallowed me whole.
ii
When you sit in a wolf’s belly, his acid will try to break
you down. I know––I’ve been here many times before.
It’s amazing what will fit in a wolf’s belly
look––there’s my old bedroom just as I left it
brothers and sister as they were when our mum remarried,
when we still all loved each other, had hope that things would be,
finally, all right.
The wolf has kept it all.
It’s so dark I can’t see where new things lurk––
I only realise they are there when I trip over them
on my way across the story.
My bed with scratchy blankets, sheets with holes
repaired into knots. They snag my toes.
I know Nan is downstairs sewing, always sewing,
or she’s in bed asleep, shouting out to her dead friends
take me now, I’m ready, please God, take me now.
iii
Outside, the voices of the woodsman, my children, my friends
say fight, be angry––don’t listen to the reasonable voice,
the reasonable voice can’t help you here.
Take the knife, find his weakest side
and find the light.
iv
I can see his heart, his liver, his spleen
even with his belly cut open, I can see
the blood flowing. He doesn’t lose a beat:
Look how ugly you’ve made yourself
with the blood still dripping down your arms.
v
He is the Big Bad Wolf after all. You can’t kill
an idea. He says whatever he may or may not have done
anger is the source of all evil in the world.
He gives me a needle and thread
says I have to step back inside––a decent person
repairs the damage they’ve done.
vi
It’s hard, in the dark, to know how much more
is left to do. The world is such a big place
my needle is small and with only my guts
for thread, my innards are tired of stretching
to fit the task, stitching and unpicking,
stitching, stitching, stitching.
*
Hannah Linden is a Northern working class writer based in Devon, UK. Her most recent awards are 1st prize in the Cafe Writers Open Poetry Competition 2021 and Highly Commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. The Beautiful Open Sky with V. Press is her debut pamphlet (shortlisted for the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023) . Twitter/X: @hannahl1n
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