Catherine Norris exquisitely captures the intimate bodily nature of loss and joy, pleasure and pain across four poems. If in ‘Motion’ the memorable feelings of hurt and grief slip between tenses, then in ‘Oceanic’ pleasure unspools moment by moment, and the magical knowledge of life on earth expands star by star.
Motion
The pain started where you would expect
2am dog-bark-of-the-chest, echoing out
touching all the white walls of your rented
flat in the old water cure hotel – the walls
you’d imagined framed jazz posters hanging
as you made coffee and toast, whilst listening
to Jazz Praises at St Paul’s, telling him again
how Kyrie is your favourite
and you start the poem talking about yourself
in the third person because you’re running
from the feelings, as fast as Daphne with every
intention of turning into something more beautiful
than yourself
so I switch
to see what it’s like when I take them as mine
and the pain moves up through my spine,
across my shoulders, like the boulder but sharper,
lighter. The ghost of a touch.
And him is you and all I can do to stop the edges
of my eyes from crumbling, like your right
hand in the dream and we know what it means,
that is to say, we accept it. Aid and abet it,
make the suffering sacred. I feel the weight
of the coffin corner, my heart as muscle
carrying my forever gorilla. Picking fluff
from your belly, sleep from your canthus.
Diamond is a rhombus at your forehead.
Oceanic
We had been watching coral reefs spawning
powder puffs and balls encased in semen
a film of almighty popping into unimaginable
vastness,
like how we talk about our size
– how miniscule we are to contain such multitudes
but it’s true, whatever truth is, layers of forgotten
knowledge accessed only by a swinging crystal
and after you leave I watch 6 gill sharks
fight in the depths and know it isn’t all
sci-fi magic in any place on earth
– blood mixing with water
like a chemistry experiment
my teenage eyes
would have locked into,
a matter of tracing edges of where
one thing ends and another begins
– the next morning we share breakfast
on a tree stump in the church yard,
April sits, strips erotic shade
around us
cross-hatching the latest luminescence
hot off the fiery tresses of our biggest
star – and you might say, we are made
of it and I might start singing Joni Mitchell
in my cold rid croak and you’ll laugh
at me and vow to find a meme that I sound
like
and in that moment, I realise I am swimming
with you and we are spawning, fertile
and radiant, falling to the sea bed
like dust, only to begin again.
Hands down
I downward dog
and push my chest
towards my legs
consider us
pressed
Paper plane
you make of me
fold upon fold
to fly
I was told,
once upon a time,
like fairy tales
that no two snowflakes
are the same
pale paper lies between us
tears slowly under pink glaze
we make from thinking
into the tuck
into the pleat
take a seat on each other
throne of our edges
device holds desire
drawing crowds towards us
each crease of adored skin
a little death
and a new beginning
5th house
The pavement is a wedding
scattered-pink-pretty, and windy,
blowing something
of what has gone before
into the scene I stand in,
clapper-board-cut.
I breathe in your sweatshirt
before I wash it.
The smell is everything
you can’t admit.
all of which I’m trying to forget.
About Catherine Norris
Catherine Norris is a poet and experimental spoken word artist living in Malvern, Worcestershire. Her poetry has been published in the Four Way Review, Inter-View and commended by Andrew McMillan in the Magma Poetry Competition. She has also recorded spoken word for Err Records, France and Miracle Pond Records, UK under the name Plastic Moonrise. She is currently a practice-based poetry PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, England, exploring women in domestic space. Follow her on Instagram @marbleplayground and listen to her latest recordings here.
Feature image: detail from André Kertész’s Distortion #40, (1933), via Wiki Art, under fair use.