Kaycee Hill

Scuffing


I picture my mother at eleven years old –

            bow-legged, pint-sized, confined in her uniform,
eyes weary even then, pulled in at the corners,
                        cast in hickory, flecked with gold,

            the same shade Diana Ross & the Supremes wore
on the cover of Cream of the Crop, shook those hips in.

Gappy teeth, freckled cheeks, walking home from school,
            dragging new Clarks against salmagundi brick,

their leather-cracked cry trailing behind
            like the music of a cabasa made from gourd,
like bay leaves laughing, rice and peas boiling.

I see her enjoying the scuffing, revelling in its wrongness –

the desecration of shoes so dismally British, so hideous,
mouth flung open to the sky, armed to the back teeth
            with glee and remembering

that pot of Kiwi black polish under the sink, that’ll slide over
            the damage like shea butter.

I see her playing out the trouble she’d be in, hearing it
            like an echo in an aluminium can,
                        Great-Nanny’s voice rearing up

over the ruins, the crime scene,

            then simmering down to a tiny puff of steam
because she’s eleven, grown, a God –

 
*


Day Visit at HMP Erlestoke
 
 
We’re ninety minutes into our voyage and everything is melting:
lamp posts, car-wheels, golden arches, glossy liquorice wires
cuffing the sky, cut between gums of cloud like dental floss.

My pupils reflected in the window have become a gameshow,
caught in a soup of motion where the world and everything in it
has coalesced into this unknowable, unsayable grey void.

Then he surfaces. Past the jangle of cables, lights, and uniforms.
It’s just our family left. Awkward silence. A single hug.
Curious, isn’t it, how we find our inheritance whittled in skin?

Driving away – Corinne Bailey Rae’s Girl Put Your Records On
crawls over the backseat, gnaws on something deep. Folkloric.
It settles in my eardrums like rain spittle, like someone else’s story.

 
*


Hot Sauce


The knife in my hand glints – brink up,
crescent body mottled by dried flecks
 
of Fairy Liquid, silver-paled in its curve
like the moon’s anaemic fish-belly.
 
This tabasco bottle is a monolith bare
of blood. I loiter over its opening,
 
over sauce congealed in a maroon ring
around the bottle’s blurred neck;
 
clots fluctuating colour where the fridge’s
waning peroxide light strikes it,
 
a choker of tiger’s eye. Aunt May’s face
beams down her pride – go on, go
 
on, the butter knife is a guide navigating
vertically through this glass carcass
 
like how a humpback whale steers the sea’s
upset bowels, its blues and blacks
 
striking sauce between flayed breaths.
Something in this hour turns me
 
greedy. I think it is the heat; how it rages
down the throat, sears off taste buds
 
with its tsunami of mustard seed and chilli,
crucifying me, in my mother’s blood.
 
 

FOR YOU (FOR YOU)
    11     Muse
    12     A Caged Thing Freed
    13     What Love Looks Like
    14     Naturalist
    15     Kitchen
    16     Shapeshift
    18     The Collector
    19     Dreams of Home
    20     Ghost
    21     For the Hive
    22     Scuffing
    24     The Gift
    25     Last shift at St Wins

MY GEOGRAPHIES
    29     Polystyrene Cup
    30     A SIDE
    32     B SIDE
    33     Elegy for Buster
    34     Night Shift
    35     In the queue at Motion
    36     At the train station a pigeon
    37     Day Visit at HMP Erlestoke
    38     Blessed
    40     Sleep Paralysis
    41     Leaving St. Ives
    42     A poem
    43     Seal Island, St Ives
    44     Oshun
    45     Self Care

HAS IT COME TO THIS?
    48     Flying Ants
    49     Fresh Set
    50     A Woman on Shirley High Street
    51     On Grief
    52     Urban Kites
    53     The Marlands, Midday
    54     Hot Sauce
    55     Bully
    56     To Get Inside
    57     Vignettes about the New Forest
    58     Little Deaths
    60     Pendulum
    62     Spring Begins in Leigh Woods

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE LIGHT I FEEL THE SUN
    64     Leo Season
    65     Core Memories in Málaga
    66     Strip Tease
    67     Recurring Dream
    68     Remember
    69     Lauryn Hill at Boomtown
    70     Come Along with Me
    72     Hooked
    73     Dad, Eighteen
    74     Hallowed
    75     Bedroom Witch
    76     A Memory
    77     Roots
    78     Free Party
    79     Makeshift