Prac Crit

Pig Wood

by Liz Berry

Interview

by Lily Blacksell

Liz and I met in June, at her house in King’s Heath, Birmingham. It was the first time we had met in person, but not the first time we had spoken about her poetry. Earlier this year, when I was writing about Black Country (Chatto & Windus, 2014) in my dissertation, I asked Liz some questions over the phone. I was very excited to talk to her again.

Real-life Liz is as quick-witted and warm as her works would suggest. Black Country has won her critical, national and local acclaim, not to mention the 2014 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. It is a remarkable book. The poems have been described as rooted but also flighty, uplifting and soaring. Her subject matter is often personal, precise and specific, but always identifiable. By his own admission, Jeremy Paxman looks at the world differently after reading Liz’s poetry.

‘Pig Wood’ marks a gradual transition in Liz’s writing. It is one of several of her poems sparked by the paintings of George Shaw. Like a lot of Black Country, it is set in Sedgley, Liz’s hometown, the place she knows like the back of her hand. There is a fleeting glint of the dialect used so deftly and loved so dearly in the collection. Unlike some of her older poems, though, it is written by a mother, and motherhood is not yet such a well-trodden path.

After a brief tête-à-tête with Mrs Truffles, Liz’s fifteen-year-old Border terrier, I turned my attention to the poem and the poet.

LB

Is this poem going to form part of a new collection? Is it in conversation with other works?

LB

‘Pig Wood’ is, I think, a work in progress. I started it around the time I was finishing the poems for Black Country but it seemed to come from a slightly darker place. It is part of a sequence of poems that I’ve written based upon the paintings of the Midlands artist George Shaw, who almost obsessively paints his childhood home, Tile Hill in Coventry. I was looking for ways to write about the Black Country, about home, and I wanted to explore adolescence and my feelings about it.

My partner bought me the book of George Shaw’s paintings, some of which I’d already seen, and it seemed a way in. They reminded me so much of the Black Country. They’re these eerie, almost desolate scenes of a Coventry housing estate at different times of day and of the year. A lot of them come from a series called ‘Scenes from the Passion’, and they inspired many of the poems which went on to be in Black Country. Somehow, being able to focus on the painting, and free to write around the idea, the image, or something that it evoked for me, allowed me to get under the skin of what I wanted to write about.

Shaw said about Tile Hill: ‘I haunted that place, and now it haunts me.’ That is very much how I felt about the Black Country at the time. I was living away and trying to write about it, and my mind was increasingly haunted by it. I think, like Shaw, I felt caught between two worlds. So I wrote quite a few ‘Scenes from the Passion’ poems (a prefix they had lost by the time they came to be in Black Country), including ‘The Way Home’, ‘The First Path’, ‘The Silver Birch’ and ‘Christmas Eve’. There are more which didn’t go into the book but were published in magazines, like ‘The 4th November’, ‘The Evening’ and ‘The Steps’.

Then came ‘Pig Wood’, in a flurry, a sort of frenzy. I had gone for a walk on Christmas morning, on the way back home to my mom’s, through a little scrubby bit of woodland in Sedgley in the Black Country. It’s one of those woods where you can see the entrance from the road, but nothing else. As I was walking in by myself I thought it seemed like such a dark place, a place where something secret or terrible might happen. A girl might walk in and never walk out… It was a place I used to go all the time as a teenager; I suppose the woods are prime places for teenagers to go. Seeing it again really made me think of this Shaw painting, ‘Pig Wood’, although his wood looks a lot lovelier than the one in my poem turned out to be! So it was then that I started the poem. As I wrote, it seemed tinged with something of the folk song, the myth, the murder ballad; something about adolescence, about place, about the forbidden, about memories of terrible things. I was writing the poem just before I got pregnant with my son. Then, because it seemed to suggest terrible things happening with a child, I found that when I became pregnant, I couldn’t bear to write it any more. My editor wanted me to work on it for Black Country but I had to put it away, I couldn’t touch it for months and months. I’ve only been able to come back to it quite recently, working on it a little bit and pulling it together. It might go with some of the other ‘Scenes from the Passion’ poems. I’m writing another one about the library, so they might all form part of a sequence for whatever comes next.

LB

I remember last time we spoke, you talked about places haunting you while you write about them, or while you are away from them. I feel ‘Pig Wood’ takes that to an extreme. Not only is it a place that’s haunting you, or the ‘you’ in the poem, it’s a place the ‘you’ absolutely cannot get away from.

LB

Yes, it’s the idea that a place is inside you and you can’t escape it. It will come back to you at your best times, but also your worst times. In Shaw’s book of paintings, there is an interview with him that really struck me and made me want to write about his work. He says that he sometimes feels in a limbo, an in-between place. He’s no longer part of Tile Hill, he’s not one of the lads in the pub any more, but he also doesn’t feel part of art school, or part of that world. That’s something I really identified with. When I was writing Black Country, I was aware of this parallel life, this other life that I’d dreamt of but hadn’t chosen, this lovely sort of untroubled suburban life.

I was really struggling with the questions: did I want to write? What’s it for? What’s it about? Was it worth it? Was it worth the anxiety and the… perhaps the trouble of mind it sometimes caused me? But at the same time, I could never really have chosen that other life and felt completely happy or satisfied. There would have always been a longing for something else. I think that tension is in the paintings, and it’s starting to emerge more and more in my work. I’m writing about home and what it means. Once you’ve left, can you ever go back? At the end of my long poem ‘Christmas Eve’, there’s that line ‘and although we can’t ever go back or be what we were’, and sometimes you’d give anything to do just that, to return, ‘to be with you tonight’.

LB

That is a beautiful part of that poem – I’m very fond of ‘Christmas Eve’. It is interesting that you’re talking about limbo, because in a lot of your poems ‘the woods’ are in-between places, a meeting of the rural and urban, animal and human. Looking back through Black Country, the woods seem to represent a number of different things. In ‘The Woodkeeper’, for instance, ‘love becomes a wood itself’, which feels so personal and tender. Then in other poems, the woods are threatening and scary, a place you don’t come back from.

LB

I think if you’ve grown up in an urban or suburban area, these little bits of woodland or scrubland (the sorts of places Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts talk about in Edgelands) are the only wild places you’ve got. They are the transgressive places, the secret and hidden places where there’s always a sense of danger. People disappear and bodies are found, people get pregnant, people fall in love. The woods can be a location for wonderful, ecstatic things, but also bad things. That is the appeal for me. The ability to touch the wildness, while not living in the wild. Woods are so laden with the myth of the fairy tale, what it is to be somewhere outside of society.

LB

Yes, and with fairy tales in mind, I was struck by the coming of age connotations in ‘Pig Wood’, the feeling of being at a pivotal stage in adolescence. There is such childishness in phrases like a ‘shadow puppet enchantment’. The rhythm of the poem helps it to gambol along, a bit like a fairy tale. Then of course there are the very powerful last couple of lines. The buttercup image is so violent but so infantile.

LB

That’s something I explored in Black Country as well. I’m interested in myths and fairy tales, and what personal resonances they might have, or what they say about girls and women – what happens to girls when they become women. I’m drawn to those themes in the work of other poets too, poets like Pascale Petit and Vicki Feaver, people who aren’t afraid to use myth to write about their own lives, or to explore dark, sensual, or troubling things.

LB

We’ve spoken before about the connection between animal and human, and how the line between the two is one you like to blur. That seems to be happening in this poem.

LB

Yes, I’m always conscious of and interested in the interplay between the human and the animal, the way that boundary can be pushed through at times. This is often in sensual moments, or intensely physical moments like sex, or when we’re in pain, when we have children, when we feel afraid. I think we feel closer then to our animal selves. We forget our human or civilised ways. I think ‘Pig Wood’ does draw on that idea of the animal and the human, because it’s about a frightening experience, an experience of vulnerability – birth and also destruction.

LB

On that note, Pig Wood is an area of danger and decay, but things are very much alive there. The image of the mole, for example (‘sorrow slithered […] silky as a mole’) is absolutely fascinating and weird and visceral. Then there’s the rabbit’s skull becoming an ‘ivory jewel box’, and ‘sorrel blooms on blood and unfused bone’. Things are thriving in a place where it feels as though they shouldn’t survive. An extra weight is added to this by the presence of a child in the poem. Was life coming from adverse circumstances a conscious or deliberate aspect of writing the poem?

LB

I wanted to draw out the idea of… how can I say it? That there is a constant cycle of creation and then decay. Nature is incredibly pervasive and fierce. You can see that all over the Black Country and the West Midlands, these former urban and industrial areas. Factories, mines and pit shafts have been taken over now by nature. They have been reclaimed. Animals live there. Grass and flowers grow and children play there. Nature overrides us and keeps going in spite of us.

LB

There’s a sense of nostalgia and yet the tone of the poem is quite menacing. It deals with the things you (or the ‘you’ addressed in the poem) want to remember and the things you don’t: ‘as if these were the last days of something worth saving’. You’ve said that the poem was prompted by a wood near where you grew up, and your memories of that place. How much crossover is there between the ‘you’ in the poem and you in real life?

LB

While I’ve never been to Pig Wood, Tile Hill, or any of the places in Shaw’s paintings, I’ve described them before as the key in the lock, a way of getting under the skin of certain Black Country experiences. That said, a really difficult thing – and I’ve found this hard in general – is that when you write about a place, or experiences and events in certain places, people want so much to believe that it’s the truth, and that it’s something that happened to you. But it’s not. You might have seen that place, or been there, or something similar might have happened to you somewhere similar, you might have known that sorrow… but by the time it’s become a poem, it’s not you and it’s not ‘true’. I think that’s sometimes hard for people to remember, and I have that impulse too. I want to read something and feel as though I know all about the poet. That’s such a human instinct. But in many ways I want to guard against it and create a circle of privacy around myself.

LB

I understand that, and it’s something I picked up on because the poems in Black Country very often use an ‘I’, whereas ‘Pig Wood’ so insistently uses ‘you’. I wondered, therefore, how you place that poetic voice and how you visualise that ‘you’.

LB

I think that very often in poems, ‘you’ is just another way of saying ‘I’, isn’t it? Although sometimes it is ‘you’, which can be a way of pushing the poem away from ourselves and a way of implicating the reader as well. Towards the end of the poem, with ‘you // yes you’, I want to draw the reader in and stir something unsettling in them. The poem holds ideas of shame, guilt and vulnerability, which I wanted somehow to place in the reader’s mind as well.

LB

While the ‘you’ has such an emphasised presence, there is also the ‘he’, who is only mentioned as ‘he’ once. Elsewhere his presence is merely implied by a ‘hand’, a stealer of promises, something quite disembodied. There’s a similar ambiguity surrounding the violation in the poem. With that in mind, I wanted to ask about the traumatic experience that gets recounted, that the mother is remembering. How much are you attributing it to a person (the ‘he’), and how much to a place (the wood)? Or are the two inseparable?

LB

That’s something I struggled with on and off while writing the poem. There have been many, many different versions of it, and in a previous draft I’d made the story more explicit. When I took it to my workshop group, everyone suggested that I was telling the reader too much. I want the poem to feel like a folk tale, something overheard, something that could happen to anyone, or that happens all the time. I didn’t want to attach the poem to a specific scenario with two players. I wanted the whole feel of ‘Pig Wood’, including the experience of adolescence, to be tinged with vulnerability, because I really think it is. I look back now on my own teenage years and I realise I was so naive in so many ways. Thinking of the situations I put myself in, I was very lucky that sadder things didn’t happen to me. It’s a time when you’re so open to things, which is amazing and thrilling, but you’re so raw, green and new as well.

LB

That’s certainly a feeling I remembered from Black Country poems like ‘The First Path’ and ‘The Silver Birch’.

LB

I see this poem as the flipside of ‘The Silver Birch’, in a way. That poem is about these angelic, pre-gender, pre-sex experiences. ‘Pig Wood’ is the dark side of it, the opposite of that delight.

LB

But with some of the same descriptions and defining features (‘Yes this is the place, with its silver birch fine-boned / as a steeple’). It’s lovely to have those chimes with the previous poem, but in a completely different tone. I see now how you’ve broken it down so that it’s not too specific a scenario, but there are still pinpoints. I wanted to ask about the photograph. I feel like it brings an added threat – the wood ‘remembers you’ – as though there’s evidence of whatever happened. Is there anything more behind that photo?

LB

It’s an idea that really troubles me. I feel very fortunate to have had my teenage years just before the internet and mobile phones. I know I sound so old fashioned when I say this, but I think we had a freer, lovelier, less scrutinised youth. It’s hard to be a teenage girl now. Everyone takes photos of everything, every mistake you make or embarrassing thing you do. Before, you just did it. That was it. It disappeared off into the ether. Now, it’s recorded. There’s evidence, scrutiny and exposure of almost everything. That’s such a vulnerability that people perhaps don’t even recognise yet about themselves or their lives – proof of you and what you’ve done that will not go away. That worries me.

LB

And the poem carries that sense of being troubled and worried (‘wrens fretted and hid themselves in branches’ – I love that line) but it’s also the locations in the poem that seem sad. The estate can’t sleep, is half drunk (‘kaylied’), the willows are ‘soddened with weeping’. There’s such sadness in the poem, as though everywhere feels bad for what is happening or has happened. At the same time, I wondered if there’s pleasure there too? Does the phrase ‘you are afraid of yourself, what you might still do’ suggest she still has these animalistic desires that might return? Do you think there’s any pleasure in the pain of this poem?

LB

Perhaps there is fascination. The adult self in the poem is at a very difficult, nervous time. She’s crouching in her child’s room, waiting, listening to the sound of their breath. Those are the sorts of things you do when you’re an anxious, sleep-deprived new parent, continually checking if your child is still alive. You become so aware of your own vulnerability, but also your child’s. They’re so trusting, so completely dependent on you. Their safety is entirely in your hands. That’s quite terrifying. It’s wonderful, but it’s terrifying too. There’s always that element of ‘what if’, with your mind flicking to the worst things, entertaining dark possibilities.

LB

I wanted to pick up on the line in the poem, ‘Its name filling your mouth with dirt’. It’s funny, I’ve read poems previously, yours included, where place names are meant to evoke such nostalgia, fondness, or at least specific images, whereas Pig Wood feels like a swear word.

LB

It does! Why is that? I don’t know, but it does. Often, I use place names as quite romantic things, suffused with longing for those areas. Funnily enough, a lot of the names I use – somewhere like Wren’s Nest for example – sound lovely, but the place itself is at the centre of a big housing estate. Pig Wood is different. I remember looking at the painting, which is beautiful – a dapply sort of wood, with a name like that! It sounds Anglo Saxon, or like you say, a swear word, threatening and animalistic.

LB

So you had the painting and its title as a starting point. Was it then a case of free writing, or other writing exercises? Have you ever used ekphrasis before?

LB

I’d never written about any other art works before these paintings. Normally when I write, it starts with an idea, or a thought, or a feeling, or a need, or something I’ve heard that I want to explore. I make a note of it straight away, because I’m not very good at keeping things in my head, then I come back to it when I have the time or I feel ready. I do a lot of free writing around it. I’ll sometimes make spider diagrams around certain ideas, to see if I can make connections, and I tend to make pages and pages of notes, whizzing all over. Free writing helps me to access more surprising things, perhaps deeper things. I have to write a lot before I eventually think, ‘That’s it! That’s what I want to write about! That’s what I’m trying to get at.’ Then I’ll go through and pick out the best bits. I’ll type bits of a poem up, in fragments, allowing it to find its own form. I’m quite a slow worker, and things rarely come in just a few drafts. ‘Bird’, the first poem in Black Country, took about five years from the first idea to the finished poem. I’m tough on my poems. I want to make sure they’re the best they can be before they go out into the world.

LB

Your writing always feels so rhythmic – does that come naturally to you? Do you enjoy reading your poems out loud, to an audience?

LB

I think it can be a really amazing experience for both reader and audience when a poem comes alive. These days, as a poet you get asked to do a lot of readings. I think, especially if you’ve written in dialect, there’s a great enthusiasm for hearing your voice. I love hearing poets read their work, and some people are so good at doing it. It can feel electric. There’s a thrilling connection in hearing poets like Kei Miller and that’s a really valuable aspect of poetry today. I’m fascinated by the music in poems, and I think that’s where my enthusiasm for poetry readings comes from. I get incredibly nervous, though. I always have. I suppose that’s a good thing; it means you still care about what you’re doing.

Hearing my poems aloud is part of my writing process, too. When I’m drafting, I record myself speaking the draft. Listening back, I can often hear where the glitch is, or what word doesn’t sound quite right. I have a friend, Declan Ryan, and I send him my first drafts or first recordings. He is, I suppose, my first reader. He’ll reply with his thoughts, then it’s just a constant process of tinkering and chopping. Sometimes it’s a case of leaving it in the drawer for months or years, just like ‘Pig Wood’. I believe if you can’t get a poem right, it might be because you’re just not ready to write that poem yet, you haven’t found what you want to say, you don’t feel able to say it. I often tell students in workshops: don’t feel you have to write this poem now. It will still be there for you. Don’t feel you have to write anything now. You may have a time in your life when you’re working hard, or you’re caring for someone, or you’ve got family commitments, or your head just isn’t in the right place; poetry will wait for you. It’s not going anywhere.

LB

That’s a good point. As someone who’s been writing to deadlines for the past three years, and will be for the next two, I appreciate it very much! Everyone should have a drawer where they can put things for safekeeping.

LB

Yes, but deadlines are good too! I did a masters and I loved it, the pressure and the time limits. I wrote loads. Maybe one in every ten poems would be any good, but it’s very useful to write that much. I write all the time. I don’t necessarily finish poems, but I write them. I free write, I take notes, I read. It’s so important to keep that all going. In fact, a lot of the poems in Black Country, especially these ‘Scenes from the Passion’ poems, were written in one frenzied year.

LB

Does it help to write thematically? Do you focus on completing a particular sequence? When writing poems about the Black Country, did you have other things on the go?

LB

I had all sorts of things on the go. Actually, if you look at the Black Country poems out of context, you wouldn’t necessarily know they were ‘from’ the Black Country! But Parisa Ebrahimi, my editor at Chatto, is so clever and she pulled them all together so they feel really cohesive. She made the story out of them. But yes, I was writing a great deal about the Black Country because I was away from it but going back a lot. My partner is from the same little town as me, we’ve been together since we were teenagers, and we were always to-ing and fro-ing there. I’d just lost my grandmother and we had also come to the point where we knew we were going to move back – it just became a question of when and how that would happen. It was a real preoccupation at the time, so I almost needed to write it out, to explore it, to dig around in it. I became more and more fascinated by the area and its folklore, its wonderful dialect. I wanted to make a myth of the place, tell stories about it in a way that no one else seemed to be doing.

LB

It’s already such a well-loved collection. It seems from many reviews, you’ve become a sort of spokesperson for the Black Country – I don’t know how thrilled you are about that. I noticed some of the same dialect used in the collection is used in this poem. How much of a conscious decision is that, or how naturally does it come to you? This all came to mind when I was listening to Open Book on Radio 4 recently. Two writers who had just written ‘London’ novels were being interviewed. They were asked whether those books were intended for Londoners, or people who know nothing about London, or people who want to learn more about it, or anyone at all? Or was that not even a consideration for them when they set their books in the city? I suppose I wanted to ask you the same about the Black Country.

LB

As for being a spokesperson for the Black Country, and my feelings about that, I couldn’t be more delighted. I grew up there and my family have lived there for generations. I have a great love and tenderness for the place and the people. It’s a big responsibility, but it’s also a very privileged position to be in, when you can say good things about the place you’re from and celebrate it. I’ve been very touched by people’s responses. I’ve had so many letters, emails and people coming to me after readings. Often people feel quite emotional because they haven’t heard those dialect words for so long, or no one has ever said anything good, or anything at all, about the place they or their loved ones are from. That is such a powerful thing and it was quite unexpected.

As for who the book is for, I’d like to think they’re poems for everyone. When I was writing, I often thought: would my mom like this poem? Would people at home read it and care about it or understand it? Does it say something real or meaningful? Often, poets write about places that are very particular to them, but they do so in a way that opens it up to others, or makes others think about their own homes and dialects. Many of us know what it’s like to leave a place behind, or to be homesick, to love someone from somewhere, to long to go back and be the person you were. So I try write about the Black Country, for everyone.

LB

So you have a reader in mind when you’re writing. Do you think you seek approval with your poems, or is it more of a personal thing?

LB

It’s initially a very personal thing. The first notes are entirely personal and entirely for myself. However, by the time a poem has reached ‘poem’ status and I’m going to send it out into the world, by then I am thinking of a reader too. There might be someone in particular I’m writing to or writing for in some way. Or more generally I want the poem to be open, to let readers in.

Something has probably shifted since Black Country came out, and it’s a funny feeling really. Before you have a book, you’re just writing for yourself. You’re writing poems and sending them off into the dark. But once you’ve written the book and it’s had the lovely thing of doing well, you suddenly have a readership that has engaged with the poems, and you’re aware that there are people out there! You feel a lot more self-conscious. That’s something I’m trying to shift, almost to forget about.

LB

With that in mind, how did you feel about submitting ‘Pig Wood’ as a work in progress to something like Prac Crit? You’ve said that you workshop some of your poems and send them to friends, so it’s something you’re comfortable with to an extent…

LB

Yes, but this is one of the first few poems that’s gone out into the world after Black Country. Since the book came out, my life has changed so completely. I’ve moved back home, I’ve had a child, I’ve given up primary teaching for a while…

LB

Do you think giving up work has changed the way you write? Previously, did you just have to write whenever you had time?

LB

I had more time when I was working, because I didn’t have a child! I used to work a job share, so I did three days at school, one at Ambit magazine, and then I had Fridays off. I used to write a lot on my days off, at the weekends, sometimes in the evenings. I find it much trickier now. I have one day a week when I’m not looking after Tom (he’s at the child minder now, which is why we’re having this quiet, undisturbed chat!) and that’s the day I do all of my writing. I find I can’t write as easily if he’s in the house. If he’s napping I can just about do some admin, but that’s it. Before he was born, I used to go away for days at a time by myself, so I could really concentrate. It’s been odd not teaching – I was a teacher for nine years and I probably will go back one day when Tom is older. It’s felt like the right thing to do though, to be at home with him, and also to be able to say yes to all these amazing opportunities that I’ve had in the wake of Black Country. I think with any kind of art, you have to make hay while the sun shines. There will be quieter years, rainy days, so I can store up some poems and teaching for those.

LB

As you said, you found yourself writing Black Country while you were away from the Black Country. Now you’re writing about being a mother and having a child, it’s probably quite difficult to do so while the child is in the room with you.

LB

It is! Little children are brilliant but completely absorbing, and writing is hard as it is. So many big things have happened to me that I feel like a beginner again. I’m starting from scratch and it’s frightening. That’s partly because of the subject matter – the experience of having my son, the physical and psychological changes that brings about – which in itself feels exposing.

I fretted over what poem to send to Prac Crit. A lot of the new ones felt too big, too personal to be shown to anyone just yet. I want to work on them until I am absolutely sure they are the poems I want them to be. Because ‘Pig Wood’ felt like a continuation of some of the work I was doing in Black Country, it was a bit less daunting, I suppose.

LB

This is all very interesting, because I’m used to talking to bands and musicians about their ‘difficult second albums’.

LB

So many people have said ‘difficult second album’ to me! I was talking to my partner, James, about it. He told me a great story about Neil Young, someone he loves. Neil Young released the album Harvest, which was a great popular success, full of beautiful acoustic songs. Then he went completely in the other direction and made Tonight’s the Night, which is the first album in his ‘doom trilogy’! The Harvest fans were incredibly disappointed. But in retrospect, the albums which he went on to make were some of the best and most interesting of his career. He gave an interview in which he said, ‘I didn’t much like being in the middle of the road, so I veered off into a ditch.’ James was telling me that I don’t necessarily need to make a doom trilogy, or veer off into any ditches, but I do have to have some of that spirit. You have to keep your integrity and make the work you want to make. It will be difficult, there will be bits that people love and bits people hate, but you have to be true to yourself. All you’ve got is your work. That’s what builds your reputation and that’s what keeps your readers. People will know if you don’t mean it.

Pig Wood

by Liz Berry

In the darkling hours when the estate riles in sleep
or slumps half-kaylied in the television’s blue,

you crouch in the blackness, hand stifling your mouth,
breath held for the sound of your child’s breath.

You are afeared. You are there again. Pig Wood.
Its name filling your mouth with dirt,

wetchered leaves slapping the night,
a rabbit’s head mouldering to an ivory jewel box;

back at the end of Summer, always the end, girls drinking
from ambered pop bottles then lying down

beneath dens of alders and tarpaulin
as if these were the last days of something worth saving.

Yes this is the place, with its silver birch fine-boned
as a steeple, its willows soddened with weeping,

where he took you and undid you
amongst the shadow-puppet enchantment of dusk,

where the photograph was taken, the shutter ssh-shush
as wrens fretted and hid themselves in branches.

Where a promise was given, a promise stolen.
Your heart jimmucks and battens like a moth. Pig Wood.

Here the trees kept their lips clammed shut
through days that swelled and cankered like dog-rose.

Here is the hollow where you lay as the houses dozed,
where you dug at soil nettles bracken, used your nails,

animal as pain wheezed through you and sorrow slithered,
hot, hand-stifled, silky as a mole, into mulching earth.

Here a cry still creaks from the beaks of crows
and sorrel blooms on blood and unfused bone.

Pig Wood. Pig Wood. When you cower by the crib,
when your hand shakes, when fear flowers wild in your gut

and you are afraid of yourself, what you might still do.
Then it is inside you. Pig Wood. It remembers you, you

yes you, on your knees in the loosestrife, a yellow flower
fisted beneath your chin. The birches blind. Someone begging.

Do you like it? Tell me. Do you?

First Published by Prac Crit.

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