normal

#MeToo: Charlotte Newman

Charlotte Newman

 

 

Chasseresse

 

Rarity, porphyria and is the blood eagle real.

Satin, petri and petty, cash me out. Statins ferment

intermittently, currying kingly demons.

A bitch called quarantine.

Querelles des femmes,

Enter Hippocrates and Galen,
 
feigning fortitude in worthy-making hypocrisies

non-entities with wombs tender resignations—

always negotiate. There was no purple pigment.

There are always skaldic forums,

scathing the mud from the bone,

teasing cartilage across mucus membranes

like osmosis in reverse.

He said the blood went to my brain

and of course it was madness

to leave the house.

I left him then, paring hang nails

with a hunter’s knife,

collapsed the butcher’s block

unstopped by moonlight

and various capricious tides—

locked myself in an operating theatre

holding fort like a man: mad, madam,

pitching my tools just right.

 


§

 


These are not our stories
 


Who will give you a character—
in this labyrinth of silia;

the left ventricle of the heart
with its apex cavity filled

with two bodies as the river
gives up its dead.

Dura Mater and pia mater,
coagulum in the senate.

Criminal conversation
became congress and took itself

to be seen to. Took place by force
of sheer will.

The echoes from the clubs
would have it she was

taken up tenderly and swift
to be hurled from the nearest bridge.

There’s a shorthand for that:
sartorial vice has metonymic limits

cocked into a featured cap
and starving.

Who will give you a name
for your maiden form?

Is your child heathy and
is it a child of colour?

A cutter and a ketch
burial at Earl’s Court.

See the sagittal section
through to the maxilla

eaten by fish, souterrain
holistically healed

by femoral aortic aneurysms,
this anatomical crucifixion

feeds a fiction, the skin
of Marsus and St Bart’s.

This hand work is hard work
to dispense with; thou art sequestra,

articulate bone distractor—
stitches false as idols.

The catlin moves with ease
through the floors and seas,

finds Calvaria proximal and distal,
hunting its ground

like a pistol. Who made you thus?
Remember well

what the room looks like,
welt-full of wit and smoulder:

harmony, ice age resistance—
though these are not our stories to tell.

 


§

 


Vanilla for the dark side
 


Then the kneeling
then the set down,

action for refraction
made vulnerable on cue

what the abject hell
did he tell you?

That it was me
on the exit wound

fetishising the root canal,
cut throat minimalist

hammock in its masculine
mismatch for threepenny

fingers. Hastily run on
sentence like the much

underrated album.
What if it’s transparent

and nothing gets over.
What if we thank each other’s

mothers and antiseptic resistance
as a means of not really cutting

it. Only knowing the motion
put is not the motion set

onto, that touch is equal
to the mission broached

among those sitting
at the table,

that the triangular nonsense
fundamental to design

only works in handcuffs,
that superior knowledge

eats the fruit of the tree
most divided and knows

all the best firecrackers,
the most easily not set upon;

eats them ceremoniously
for breakfast.

 

§

“Chasseresse” and “These are not our stories” are from Trammel (Penned in the Margins, 2016).