Lily Finch studied English at Oxford before joining the Goldsmiths Creative Writing MA. She has been shortlisted for the Martin Starkie Prize.
Email: lily.finch99@outlook.com
Right Breast
a full week you’ve hung ripe,
bulbus as a baby’s skull
knobbled as a cauliflower
and squealing like a piglet
cotton-swaddled, bristling
and hungry for the floods,
you are heavy as a taut
sack, fit to burst
while Left is sound, a sleeping
policeman, my nuisance
you ache at each breath
like a siren-beached
you won’t be lulled;
you howl when touched
and yet you scream
for a touching;
only when held do you gurgle,
cooing at the warm palm
embrace, like a conker
placed back in its case
you nuzzle your pearl nose
forth, polished and thrumming
now, a newfound mould;
in this way you beg a kiss–
I know all your tactics, minx
haven’t we lived abreast
these twelve years past;
haven’t I’ve seen you swell
slumber and perk, and then,
at your bright-eyed best:
fat and singing,
in the mouth of a man.
You Are Not My Ladybird
Oh my, my fine beast, my Old Boy Blue
you are not my Ladybird but you will do
your rust-speckled spine, your haunches blue–
a steel smile stowed to this humdrum city,
I press my pelvis to your cobalt bones
and feel you purr beneath me as a storm
electric; didn’t we ride by a patchwork sea,
spokes winking free while the world got sicker
didn’t we chase those dirty cliffs, entwined
you thrumming wildly and I, glad
and alone upon your blue back; how we sped
by the laced-light in the Tunnel of Trees
and now, my love, have I led you here
to the din and the clash of the Kentish Town Road;
strange strangers in this place, we two–
nervous and whinnying, we pause at the lights
and then,
then we are flying
Mother, Mother, Mother
I saw a mother lose her boy;
it was primal, like the slicing
of that blue and curling cord
but different smells, I imagine
she says to me that as he died
she could have sworn, she felt him leave
he leapt out from her gut, she said
he left her body halved, she said
and when he died, I’m telling you
the sounds, the sounds there in that room
I remember thinking: this must
be something very close to hell
no, not so much the rattling
his breathing made, an engine cracked;
I make my peace with this, as one
salutes a magpie, grave and quick–
no: it’s her sounds which I keep tucked
there in the threadbare purse that leaks
it’s cold coins often still, as now,
into my garden’s year-on sun
where a blackbird sings so hard, so
hard, I swear it to God it will burst,
for her sounds, her sounds, so searing
with an old, old, sorrow; and yet
what I must tell you, is that this
which I am bound to remember-
this cavern of sound I unstitch
like a wound, how it stings each time
and then is beautiful, at once
the most starkly beautiful thing
I have known, something like a fierce
blue sky, or the red assault of poppies
is the absolute agony
of loving, a birth in reverse:
mother, mother, mother
kiss your boy
touch his hair
and marvel at his shoulders
as they grow large
I think, every time that I see
a woman walking with her son.
I can’t tell you how still, how strange
it seemed after he died, and how
often I swam: once, with Lenny,
I found a great fish, silver and dead.
The Week That Follows
I don’t care much for mirrors;
to catch my glance is to pierce
that film of plastic strangeness,
silvered over me like the sheet
which spreads on school custard.
I take up an oozing sickness,
my thick disguise; between the aches
and the snot-clog, I am grateful,
preoccupied by the creamy basics
of my bed-bound existence.
I could get used to this, I think.
Only flickers of unease prick
my comfort, like when I see
a man touch a woman on TV.
On Sunday morning, I sever
the stiff heads of lavender;
shaving the stems of their purple
I lay them to rest in a Tuppaware
yet once, twice, I tear a cocoon,
fingers slipping blind inside
a gluey pocket, to a curled surprise:
the lilac buds hurried together
like an ordinary head, but inside
the caterpillar hides
as she becomes a moth.
David and Goliath Story
So you, unpeturbed,
let me weep on your
marvellous stomach–
hallowed ground,
ribbed by the sleeping mounds
of nested muscles–
and when I am done,
wrung out, washed in,
belly-up on the sand
like a beached jelly,
you gift me a Stanley Hammer:
practical yet elegant,
like me, on a good day
then later, you tail me
from New Cross to Kilburn
in a biblical flood,
you out on your cycle
and I, tracing your lights
from my great, greasy
bus-box, petrified–
a silver-flash sardine
chasing a humpback,
a David and Goliath Story!
you tell me, hero-mode–
but tell me this, tell me how,
of all the faces in the world,
did I align myself to yours?–
noble-nosed, baby-flushed–
a miracle! Pulled up next to mine,
I spy you, Lover,
through the window-fogged—
I took a neat nail
and my Stanley Hammer,
hung that grin up
on my heart’s cushioned wall.
Heron
the soft scrag of the sloping Heath,
is too hot, now, for almost-October;
Saturday-people walking on by, spikey
and smug in their Saturday clothes,
recklessly saddle their picnic balloons
on the tongue-tied trees, who sough
at this indecency, this shame
they did not consent to this, I hiss.
But then we fall for eachother,
my Heron and I; see him, so coy,
winking behind the hoary grass,
twisting his marvellous neck
to show me, only me, the length
of his manly beak: very nice,
very nice, I gurgle. He blushes
like sudden rain, turns towards me
beak concealed, he is one sleet line
straight as a reed, still as a grave—
I beg him, Heron, take me home
back to your bone lattice bed,
feed me fat little moles till I feel better,
till white quills sprout from my neck
Sticky Lullaby
goodnight my darling
I’m four floors up at Senate House
just drifting off pleasantly
in the room chock-a-block with Chesterfields
rows and rows of them
like dimpled pigs in the abattoir queue
waiting for the making
of a thousand slick little sausages
so goodnight my darling
I’m taking the piglets
and we’re getting out of here
we trot fast in our finest cowboy boots
licking our fuzzy lips
and thrusting our coiled appendages,
and what’s more, we’re dreaming of you
making sticky love to me
at strange, hip-acheing angles
in a high sticky barn where the pigs aren’t dead,
just sleeping,
in a puff of apricot hay;
you and I have burnt our bookbags
and grown snouts
so there’s nothing, really,
to be getting on with.
Sea-Hymn
I dream of tides
in my half-slumbers
the water rushing in over the beach
where I grew up,
and along the street
where I lived.
with the stealth of a thief it rises
to tickle the cliff’s edge;
I turn to say
I’m dreaming, aren’t I?
and then the shingle is singing
that sea-hymn
where my freckled mother holds me
in an August flood,
our faces licked
by the tang and the swell;
her breaststroke was always much stronger than mine.
she is swimming back,
back to the chalk bulk
we live on
whose old milk fortified my nails,
made my bones bright white
and my hair
so glaring
but I linger,
bear my eyeballs to the brine
and catch those threads of waterlight;
she will be waiting by the rosemary bush,
wearing sand like stockings on her tiny feet.