Kate Potts

Doomdark’s Revenge

Doomdark leaks into the house

through a rotted angle of window frame.

The dusky scrape and hubble of him’s

furred with a dandruff of gloss-white paint.

He draws in the ribs and sails of himself,

plants his manta ray body beneath

the settee and his one good eye rings out:

a peppered, indelible moon.

His claws rasp on the carpet’s weave;

he squats, cold as cordite. While I am gone

he upsets the salt pot so that a sting

of crystals will slough my heels.

He gags sandy bile from his gut-depths,

coughs it in rivulets over the lino,

gnaws the furniture’s edges and legs

to a snotty mash and draggle of fibres, peels

a nest of woodchip from the timber

of the kitchen door. Everything heaves, leans.

Dumb totem, he guards the back door,

still and implacable when I return.

I sit, sink. Doomdark clatters,

barks his low siren, cranks out blue sound:

a hounded, metallic whale. He springs, swipes

at the auricle of my ear with a scissor

of claw, then snaps back, jumpy as a ratter.

Now time’s a stutter, a halt.

My fingers pinch at the bloody cartilage.

Oh the incessant intent of that one, good eye!

He sees, for all the house’s bleach and clean,

my wrongs, tied up in brittle muslin

under my liver – a pocket of growths, of moulds –

the dank cheese of them resting inside me.

*

Catalogue of Strange Fish

From the unfathomed, farthest away from the light, from the sea’s

iron guardedness they come –

pin-eyed, with flesh like tree bark. Their jaws are gorgeously spiked,

ragged with toothpick teeth, goon teeth, prison bar teeth.

O anglerfish, vampire fish, oarfish, goonch. A strange fish holds himself

upright and fast to the park railings. He is white knuckled.

His eyes focus upwards as if counting or reciting, tugging at the brain’s

stubborn pinions. When you ask if there’s somewhere

he needs to get to, he only sets his jaw harder. You both know that if he

acknowledges you, he’ll fall. Every one of your dreams

is about the president, however tangentially. Each morning, pre-waking,

mucid insects seem to attach themselves

to your collarbone and gnaw in at the marrow. What if we could all say

whatever came first to mind, whenever we wanted to? No

perusal. Scullion! Arse-wipe! Warp-faced pignut! Invincible as a body

that’s snug in the womb. What if we could all get

whatever we wanted, whenever – as in the fairy tale? On the beach

at Marazion the surf is spangled with mackerel scales.

The sands heave with stranded bodies, silver bullets drying

and curling up in the winter light, so close to home.

*

Postscript

What if love’s not well-tooled keys and locks, glass slippers, or mutilated feet?

What if love’s like tracing a silhouette in a peasouper

or like watching Polaroid paper etch itself with shades? In the slow furrow

of the nightshift hours, when workers – returning or leaving –

bruise at the edges, nod themselves back into sleep, love might keep schtum,

might speak in whiskers and bristles, jowls, spiny hair,

an awesome stink. O my godmother: for a woman to play low-stakes poker

with her friends is not, in my view, the least bit shocking.

Neither are these things call for alarm: excessive literature consumption;

making the first move. We have fallen

asleep on the back step, chins in claws, feet tucked snug, while the universe

is bearing down its icy helmet of stars.

He shifts and settles again, cranking out snore and purr, dreaming acetate reels.

How is it September already? I go inside; I leave the kitchen door adrift.

ANIMAL SONG

11 Thirty-three

12  Animal Song (I)

13  Prelude (with electronica)

14  Lullaby Girl

16  Iron Horse

17  Stray Dog

18  Enchantment

20  Grizzly Bear

21  Footnotes to a Long-distance Telephone Call

24  The Homecoming

25  Wolf

27 To Read a History in the Earth

29  Anthropologies

31  Cloud; Silver Lining

32  Doomdark’s Revenge

34  Home Economics

36  Suckling Pig

37  Shoplifter of the World

38  Fawn

39  Poem in Which I Consider My Labours

40  Scanderoon

41  Catalogue of Strange Fish

from THE BLOWN DEFINITIONS

45  I: Claude Mesito

49  II: Sleep Psalm/ Weather

53  III: Some Definitions

57  IV: An Ilha Tale

63  V: From the first quarto of Claude Mesito

POSTSCRIPT

67  Día de los Muertos

68  Pistons and Bones

69  Wayfarer

70  When Glamorous Women Make Age-appropriate Dressing Statements

72  California

73  Animal Song (II)

74  Postscript

77  Notes

‘There is perhaps something otherworldly… in the rich musicality of Kate Potts’ collection. Her poems bubble and squeak with every phonic device you could desire… it’s lithe, bony, sinuous, a writhing lexis that grips its subject hard, sending explorative tendrils deep and offers a powerful conversational voice.’ – Noel Williams, The North, on Pure Hustle

‘An engrossing debut…a human, personal engagement between writer and reader.’ – Charlie Cocksedge, PN Review, on Pure Hustle

‘Her voice is unusual, mesmerising and, at its best, shakes handfuls of words in the reader’s eye like stardust.’ – Clare Crowther, Poetry London, on Pure Hustle

‘Kate Potts is a pickpocket of human experience in this tightly-rhythmed, assonance-jellied, beetle-drawer of a pamphlet. Her skill is not simple pathology, she animates archived fact with human uncertainty and underbellies the leery pose of her urban nature-mortes with anatomical and emotional fragility.' – Jen Hadfield on Whichever Music