Three Poems

Fetch

At forty-five kilos I was small like a big dog,
twenty-five moles from bum up
like twenty-five moments of skin rapture
like twenty-four dribs of black sky and a gasp;

you pressed your ear against one of them,
said something in it was singing
or at least that’s how I remember –
you singing I’m a mole and I live in a hole.  
 
I curled on your chest as it thundered
hoping the night would last till morning;      
I wanted to tell you something but that something
was like holding a blade under the tongue.

Instead I prayed          Lord
if you find me
please bring me back to myself
(Lord      make it thunder        louder).

As we slipped into midnight at bone,
drowned in moonlight at lips,
I, blind in one eye, the other
flooded in kisses, was born again

in that little room,
my words, moths for the light of you.
The moon looked at itself from us –
there were scars all over.

Ten fingers counted
a dead lamp, a mute radio, flowers
and the walls that were not walls
but sky and sky.

The night was clear like a well-oiled throat
while I, its incautious silence,
at the grove’s muds wakening
caught your smile,

ran to the woods,
built a cage out of it,
ate it all.

Self-portrait with X in Mind

She lives next to a train station like all the train stations,
a girl like all the girls only her skirt is shorter,
her luggage heavier.

Her body is a cemetery,
but she uses it as a playground,
and for every occasion when she feels like doing nothing,

she pulls the long railed curtains in her long living room,
long as a long long wagon,
a train experience that goes past three big windows

like three names for a soul.
She looks outside.
The street is shuffling faces like cards.

How ugly are the curtains.
What a diseased window.

Dutiful Daughter / Golden Wife

Dipped in honey,
I am stripped of my voice,
while all around flies greet themselves
in a nursery of fondness –

Look! how elegant these customs
in these rooms,
the shape of p’s or q’s,
where women

in the voices of their fathers
tell me, not unkindly,
say yes
say yes.

There is no courtesy
by which the surgeon gives
himself to the incision –
thus is my body

groping for the word –
my dear body smiling
like a little dog, bad dog
close to her glue-sniffing human –

Look! grass
is her only call,
yet she goes back
to the house on fire.

________

 Iulia David is a Romanian-born London-based poet who graduated from the MA in Writing Poetry at the Poetry School and Newcastle University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, The Rialto, Magma, PERVERSE, harana poetry.