In Davina Quinlivan’s beautiful, elegiac poem a speaker attempts to recall and piece together childhood memories through the slipstream of images, characters and moments from films like Blade Runner and Mermaids.
False Rivers
In the film Blade Runner, the detective performs his Voight-Kampff test in order to check
if the person he is speaking to is really human, or not.
The replicants are given fake memories so that they might
be able to better control their emotions.
Unlike those postmodern pyramids I watched on screen,
I once sat in a room with the curtains half-closed and saw
small town suburbs and Manhattan skylines, intergalactic wars
and Big Bird.
Safety was found at the bottom of a bowl of rice
and toast dipped into tea.
Years and years in that small room while my mother did ______
My father resided at the local bookies.
He would bring home chocolate and
a giddy grin, if he won.
In the future, more than 30 years later,
I’m shuffling through the pictures,
but I can’t seem to find the
ones I desperately need.
I’m very frightened.
People call out for their mothers in times like these. Don’t they?
Or, maybe they wear a woolly jumper and eat chocolate cake.
They use the telephone. I reach inside the data stream.
My dog, or someone else’s dog running with an orange ball.
A girl singing while walking up a staircase, red haired and red-lipped.
The limbs of a child’s small bear caught Christ-like in a hedgerow.
A girl on a bike being carried into the wind.
Why can I only see pathetic story arcs and vanishing points?
Crane shots pulling away from the closing moments.
Heroic tales and discoveries, warm embraces,
Smiling faces,
everlasting blooms
of lives I’ve never lived.
I know something is wrong, because when I’m frightened,
It’s those reels that I usually want.
my mum’s head superimposed onto the face of
Cher from the film Mermaids, and my dad
leaping from trains like Harrison Ford.
I tell these stories to myself, filling in the blank spaces.
I know these to be false rivers.
Now they do not bridge the wound.
Yellow-spotted lichen has flowered from my wrist,
Oakmoss tender at my neck.
Becoming real, at the mercy of nature and the river’s end.
About Davina Quinlivan
Davina Quinlivan is author of Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration (Little Toller, 2022) and Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. She was Writer in Residence with Quay Words/Literature Works (Spring 2023). For several years, she has run a series of film and creative writing seminars at The Freud Museum and is also part of the founding teaching ensemble at The New School of the Anthropocene. Her creative writing has appeared in Litro, The Willowherb Review, Caught by the River and The Clearing. She is also the author of several academic monographs including The Place of Breath in Cinema and Filming the Body in Crisis. Davina is now working on a follow-up to Shalimar, a pamphlet of poetry and a novel set between Cornwall and the Black Sea. Follow her on Instagram @qdavina and Twitter @DQuinlivanB
