INDIGO DREAMS PUBLISHING LTD
WILD NATURE POETRY AWARD competition now open.
Poetry
138 x 216mm
32 pages
£6.00 + P&P UK
ISBN 978-1-912876-45-7
PUB: 11/01/2021
ORDER HERE
With Love from the Curator
Oak Ayling
To the Shark on the corner of always and never.
Oak Ayling is a Pushcart Prize nominated Cornish poet and closet librarian.
Oak's other works can be found in various literary magazines and in print anthologies 'For the Silent' from Indigo Dreams Publishing & 'Light Through the Mist' from author Helen Cox.
Reservations at the London Natural History Museum
Marble that looks like a ruined city
You stare hard & bite your tongue
But I think it too
We were that city once.
The frozen animals watch
Us like oncoming cars
You hold my hand tighter
The darkened halls forget to breathe
Shuddering with desire to go deeper
No place was more haunting than this.
A creature I once thought peaceful
Brandishes its jagged thumb
Rearing up to make a mockery of your giant frame
You lead me through the back doors
& shadows
To rooms beyond the second floor
Drawers & drawers of papers
The wings of magpies
Sharks’ teeth & palm sized pups
Still born
You look at me
& mouth the word
“Complete”
I rub tears against your cheek
Chase them down
To where the geodes make their stars behind glass
You sit there & hold me
Between your knees & arms
Whisper softly about every creature’s history but our own.
The Humours, the Lancet & the Leeches
The Tudor surgeon courts me in the hallway
His instruments sharp & twisting
It is the knees that go first when I feel it
The leeches moving down my thigh
Fingers scratch across the section label
‘Spring was considered the time for bloodletting’
My own pale face in the glass tells me
You know this dance, this wicked practice
The imbalanced humours & the Doppler-handed Doctor
Shaking his head
We pull out of the office car park
& wait for the lights at the hospital
Your thumbs tap the steering wheel
Blood runs redder when you don’t want it to
We hold our breath & count backwards from 10.
Digital Art Museum
Then just like that
In one innocent motion
Light bleaches
Against the black
Mori becomes a forest
A rippling forest of lamps
Peach & pearl
Blossom & brunnera
Our bodies pulse
Touching
Seeking
Safe
Two loops
Woven
Yours & mine
A light
Now
From the other side
Of the room
Announces
That someone has joined us.
Natural History
Mr Finch is down the hall making his dead birds
I study the architecture blindly
Unseen, a small child mounts the back of a rhino
My coat is green as finches
I twirl so as to make the feathers dance
Mr Finch is down the hall making his dead birds
You reach out & recede in hesitance
Stammer over words which wanted to be an apology
I study the architecture blindly
We do this dance in silence down the aisles
Grafting ourselves eternally to our favourite exhibits
Unseen, a small child mounts the back of a rhino.
Museum of Flat-pack Furniture
Here are the 48 allen keys you swore you lost
Between the boxes & cracks of the floorboards
The pencil you put behind your ear to look more ‘carpenterly’
You didn’t use it once
Nothing trains a man to be a father like the flat-pack
It struggles & wails at you from the floor
You put everything on backwards
The pictures in the manual pulling at your patience
Here is the mug which spilt its steaming contents over them
& the three tea towels used to mop
Your brow, Doctor, inserting screw 123775 (1 of 4)
Into nut 100514 (1 of 3) with surgical precision
As though building it perfectly might protect it this time
As though it might do a better job than I have
Here are the photos I said I deleted
Propped against the second mug of coffee & the coaster
I yelled at you to use on the changing table
Last time you didn’t build it, you put it off & we fought
You think that was bad luck
So this time the room is custard & the linen is cream
& when it’s finished we lay on the rug stroking each other’s faces
Like two kids painting a picket fence.
After Hours
Whale bones hang
Unmoving
Dressed in particles of dust
Ancient undisturbed
I climb to face it
In the gallery
& look it in the eye
Square
In the parchment hollow arch
Of its long bald socket
I lean close enough
To run fingers across the baleen
& like a harp
Hear its song
Ripple over ribs
So softly
I whisper
“Take me with you.”
Two Cats from Onomichi
Akin to running up a hill
& sliding down again
Two wily cats to this day still
Launch bravely their campaign
To breach the gates, to enter in
To dodge the standing guard
To taste the arts which lay within
From which they have been barred
In this Museum hand in hand
Or rather paw in paw
Perhaps the pair might understand
Just what nine lives are for?
Day after day, week chasing week
For years & never tire
With never more than just a peek
At what they do desire
There is a moral to this tale
Two cats from Onomichi
Enduring in the place we fail
Oh how I wish they’d teach me
'With Love From The Curator' is a squalling babe, pink and unknown, beating all the odds against its own existence. This collection of 23 new poems journeys through landscapes of love, death, infertility and museums, both real and imagined across the world, telling the quiet story of a couple fighting their own battle against the odds.
