Sleeper - by Summer Young
Intermittent Fasting
March 9th 2008
Keta watches a plant grow backwards
while mamma cries into the carpet.
Keta sees London and father,
thinks she’d prefer electric trees.
The Morning
Train stations smell like cold metal and Keta,
who envisions so-called Paternity Land.
She has been given two pound coins
that might lay nicely on mamma’s eyeballs.
14:19
In the station Keta sees herself in a piano.
They sit together, the piano explaining
the politics of suit fittings,
drawing the maths in the dust on its keys.
Sunshine Cup
Keta moulds herself into the chair.
Her face pokes through a bobble hat.
The train girl photographs the gap between her thighs
where her rooibos sits.
Every July 12th
Girls with dead hair sprint down the track like spears,
Keta goes like a falling tree. Mamma races with her.
Knee-high boot mums shun the Family of Flaws.
Keta’s brother says his father is dead.
Play
When Keta was small mamma laughed.
She would still clean but they had time for games,
she’d hoover Keta’s toes with the vacuum cleaner.
Keta has a phobia of vacuum.
Feeder
Mamma thought she was eggs and spinach.
When she walked her legs fell through drains.
She exercised her heart often,
but its red still hid behind her chest.
Moving Day
In 2011 the postman caught Keta
measuring the circumference of her arm
through the letterbox. Stuck just after the elbow.
Mamma didn’t get the court letter.
Circa September 31st 2009, 2pm
Her hair was straightened once.
Her first boy told her it looked like Odette Pavlova.
She could still see the basketball crescent
hiding under her shirt.
French
His hair smelt like a Pad Thai
and a photocopier which only copied
women that looked like women
and Keta felt like the cardboard she tripped over.
The Day She Stopped Wearing Socks
He thought Keta would like to be slammed on the desk
face down and dry like her father’s special mug.
There were multiple sock balls on the floor,
and tweezers for feeding mice to snakes.
Sometime Between the Then and the Now
When Keta woke up in the kitchen,
she was sleep-cursing the family sack of potatoes.
Dog licked her leg as she filled her bra with vegetables.
Her bed was still warm.
When Keta Forgot to Feed Her
Keta can see trees from her bedroom.
Inside, her very own sex symbol
is chewing the backbone of the rodent
formerly named Dudley.
Sports Day (i)
Once again Keta is wearing patent shoes that aren’t hers.
She crawls through a rat hole and falls.
A vine wraps a fatherly arm around her waist.
She sees rat dirt but the two don’t connect.
Sports Day (ii)
The vine gives her a waistline,
squeezes her like a currant.
She breaches the floor of a dirt cave,
wishes to stay.
Sports Day (iii)
The vine may be Keta’s father. It drags her
back to clapping sports day crowds.
They look at her like she’s a papaya on heat.
Her hands turn blue forever.
The Repression
Father had a photo of a mother once,
though she may not have been his mother.
She had a cat, who often had babies,
that she bagged up and drowned in the pond.
Any Moment He Got
Keta’s father wasn’t good with games.
For fun, they piled into the metal van,
circled the roundabout with the lights off.
Father would open the van doors and swear.
Derail
Gloomy Sunday
A small flat where the nowhere people come.
A window the other side of my exhaled smoke,
a child waits in uniform for a mother
who lost her clock in a duvet.
The child is a photo of me twelve years ago.
I should tell her it’s just her genes malfunctioning,
or push her mother
in front of her mother’s car
or bring them both to the smoke flat
to my own duvet
place them in with a box of tangerines,
decorate a tree and forget it’s March,
teach them how to draw themselves
in other peoples’ hair.
Gloomy Sunday plays for the first time since ‘51.
Javor himself pins me to the kitchen floor
with a neon sign crushing me against the old food,
‘death’ in sharp pink, grills my eyeball.
I could take them with me to the train tracks.
We might go one by one
Javor holding the sign, crying at his own composition
blowing his nose into a cheer flag.
My Marzipan Body
In the morning my marzipan body
knocks on my bed post with its drum face,
so I wake up remembering I am in it.
On the train it blankets me
so coffee man doesn’t see my money.
When I am in a bathroom
my marzipan body is a one-man-band,
trumpets and whistles outside the door
ensuring I know the drum face
in the mirror has the same jaw as me.
My marzipan body belongs to me
but was not gifted, more like
a hand-me-down toothbrush
found in a park with drain hair
woven through the fat teeth.
He’s Entitled Because He Watched His Friends Die
one swinging to and fro pushing
the heads of the grass
with dead feet drowning them with red
ants from gaping forearms
the tree branch shakes the blood
drops off the skin as the body bobs
in front of a sunset backdrop,
the other eaten alive
in the mud at a festival
the friends spewed
glitter skipped breakfast to eat
the attention with open mouths,
he’s a fund raiser now
for people who die in mud,
you saw a sadness in his stained
pillow before he turned you over
and drank you as compensation
your tights hiding in the carpet
outside a weasel pup screams for her dead
mother downstairs his parents correct themselves
with hot drawing pins through the fingertips,
they should have known those boys
would only die and cause trouble
upstairs his hands grow in size as he crushes
your wrists pubic mound hitting
you like the balls of Newton’s
Cradle you worry his parents will hear
your raw skin scraping the carpet
like buttering burnt toast
Pica
Every night to get myself to sleep
I circle the block
gifting the drains with photos
of women’s torsos.
My own stomach, so far
from my aorta,
gets frostbite,
stays heavy.
The drains give the photos
the white t-shirt look.
Beside them, the toilet tissue
I ate for lunch.
Routine
The way a dry grass plant grips and clings
for years to the desert floor
I check the drive each morning
for my father’s van.
Intermittent Fasting
A kitten clutches a wet fence
until our mother screams her off
and the pitbulls tear her up
still mewing.
I remember I held your pinkie
as we hid in the curtain.
It’s wasn’t her screaming
or the thumping of flesh
that pierced you, but knowing
our father was too violent
to give you away.
Mother sat next to the empty
reservation in the assembly hall,
holding the programme with bad print,
hoping for someone to see her white knuckles
and free her from the void
of having a family.
I asked Jesus to help her once,
but he was stuck
in a fairy-tale book I never could believe
because I was too busy
watching my big sister’s tiny hands
peel my father’s fingers
from my mother’s neck.
My Father as Danny DeVito
If he found me now,
I think my father
would resemble Danny DeVito
only Danny DeVito’s ex-wife
wouldn’t own a panic button.
My Father as the Flawed Protagonist
When he fell over in 2007
mamma laughed
as if he were a pavement stranger.
He lay on the gold carpet
like a wounded deer
hoping for a bullet.
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