I laid my heart bare;
You laid your cards bare.
Had to hand it to you,
Yours was a good hand
I gave you a hand clearing up

I slipped the King of Hearts into my pocket
And followed you out of the door.

How wonderful, you said, how precious to be pure!
As simple as the Factory wall,
And free, as well, from thoughts obscure
The Thinker wears a crown of Parisian dirt
Cursed with knowledge, the eternal introvert
We, laughing, axed his marble features
And took flight
Hiding in the limelight -
You caught me reading Wilde by torchlight

Happiness is ignorance, and ignorance is bliss,
Or is it tragic to crave the abyss? Anyway
An empty vessel I became
The mussel shell on your plate
As you licked your lips, a figure of eight
I licked my finger and drew a crown around your head
Wished you were dead

Orwell said freedom can’t exist without its name;
You erased every word, mind numbed by fame
Swore, quietly as you bound us together
That I would never think again,
Primary colours clouded my brain
You poured my poems down the drain
We watched them oscillate,
                                                        orbit,
                                                                      vanish.
You rewrote me in monosyllabic prose
Depetalled rose

So let’s have some wine before the gambling starts
God save the King, Thief of Hearts,
Raise your glass to the memory of eccentricity,
Let’s drink to faces untarnished by publicity,
Here’s looking at a future devoid of simplicity.

Many believed it would have been simpler to call them Sister, but no confusion with the nuns from the old times could be allowed, so the sisters are addressed as My Sister.
My Sister glides through the stark, clinical room to the table I have been placed at for a considerable amount of time – the bell has been sounded three times during my solitude. She motions for me to sit again with a rustle of her deep purple sleeve. The hue pulsates fear into my veins, causes my breathing to accelerate, but I do not remember why. It is from my life before, this fear, not from this life.

“I hope, Little Child, that your solitary time has been well filled with reflection and prayer?”
“Yes, praise be Magdala My Sister, it has.” Her full title must be used at Indemption progression meetings, as must mine, which here is merely Little Child, despite my being one of the oldest generations left in the White Centre.
“Let us then proceed. How long have you lived here?”
“All of my life Magdala My Sister.”
“Who is your mother?”
“Mother Eve, who has given me to the care of Mother Gilead and Magdala My Sister.”
“Who is your father?”
“God, who gave all mankind into the care of Father Adam, thence to Father Gilead.”
“Where will you next proceed from the Centre of Jairus and His Daughter?”
“Into a household to serve as a worthy wife and vessel to the Commanders of Gilead.”
“Correct, finally correct Little Child. That is all for today.”
There was a strange tone to My Sister’s voice then, but I couldn’t understand it. She sounded as though she were almost smiling, she sounded like Mother Sister does when a generation leaves the White Centre…
I cannot explain it.

Flashes of light, voices and masks, a prick in my neck, suddenly I am back in my dormitory. There are no windows, just twelve bunks beneath aching, electric light, but I can see rays streaming into my vision, balmy golden and mellow, but terrifying. Brittle explosions reverberate off the trees surrounding me. Us. The screaming and sobbing fills my head drowning out the voice that tells me that it’s alright, to be quiet.
Not this dream again, please not again. All I can feel are the wet leaves that I am suffocating in and the sweating body curled around me.

The bells ring for morning victuals, the sound of feet landing on the floor hammers around the Centre as we uniformly dress in the time given between chimes. Our dresses are full length, white cotton creations with long sleeves and high necks covered with white petticoats and white gloves. After the bleeding begins, white lace scarves are placed over our hair. I have eaten and am moving into classes before consciousness seeps in. I often lose time like this, it happens to most of us. For those who remember, it is so much worse; they are the ones who forget their minds soon enough.

Classes begin after victuals for the younger girls, those who do not yet bleed. In the West Wing the low sector girls are taught to cook, sew, knit and clean. Little Alice once told me in broken whispers in the washrooms that the high sector girls, which I was soon to be elevated to, must simply sit and sew, or view films showing them how to have and raise a Gileadean family. Sometimes one of Our Sisters will tell us a story told in the Believer’s Scriptures from behind a screen. We don’t think that Our Sisters want us to know where the stories come from, but they are sighed down the generations, those forbidden words: writing, reading, book.

Little Alice tried to describe how families are made that day in the baths, but My Sister Leah came in and took us away for punishment.

The purple flowers dying on the ground amidst the rotting leaves were the last things I saw clearly for a long time; the last sound the whimpers of Her, the woman who had stroked my face, begging for Rabbit to go with me. Darkness for many moons afterwards, then voices and machines.
Welcome, Little One, they said. You have been ill but now you are better.
I sobbed for Her and pleaded for Rabbit, but each time I did the sleep entered my neck.
Then,
Good morning Little One. You are better now. What is your name?
I answered:
Another prick, firmer and longer than before. They said it went against God’s law and religion, a name of such reverence, of the First Mother. I could not wear it.
After that they called me Little Child; I gave up crying when they burned Rabbit and stole my name.

Our Sister Leah raged. To tell a low sector girl of the secret training, about babies, was wrong. Little Alice returned to her dormitory with threads through her lips. The cold air cradled my scalp when she finished shaving, just retribution for what I had heard. Upheld by St. Paul, she told me. In my Wife’s portrait with My Sister, sent to all my possible Commanders for consideration, my hair had grown back, but darker, no longer the colour of vanilla ice. She once called it that.

When I was better I had to go alone every day to Indemption with Magdala My Sister. The same question, over and over again:
Who is your mother?
I always replied Her! Was rewarded with biscuits for my answer, which made me so weary. If I cried out for Her, asked to leave, shrieked in passion, wept for my mother, I would be pricked and be threaded through the tongue and lips for a week.
When I began Communal Indemption, Her name began to fade, her voice, her touch and then her face. He had gone long before. Now they are lost in the chasm, with my name and my self. They tell us God will save us, purify and redeem us. God has forgotten the children of the White Centre – that is the truth we pass through the walls and floors, along desks and across rooms, to every girl who enters through the marbled doors; we cannot be saved from them.

The only aim of the girls in the White Centre is to pass through Indemption and be transferred; it is our only wish in the world.
My only wish.
That is what I have been told.

“No.” I said,
clutching my little hood to my head,
blushing in the shade of the red
cloak, as they shook their heads and called me a joke.
“But I’ve read!” I protested. “I’ve seen and I’ve felt!”
“Have you done, have you been,
have you sinned in your skin,
have you lost half your soul to a dead man?”

No.
They were right, of course,
I needed to live
to write about life.
So I left my lonely path, set out into the world
with a bloody agenda, wrapped in my child’s cape.
“Red riding hood” they said,
misunderstanding the red –
it was armour, disguise,
I would leave me behind
and find a wolf instead. Would be grown up,
experienced, sophisticated.
Poet.

I found him, early one Sunday,
and lost myself on the way.

Fired treacle pouring from his hands, he wrote
and the world turned ‘round to look,
he spun his book
from icy lights and lay
in eerie shadows’ lamp,
taking in his prose with wolfy grin.

Irresistible and he knew it,
continental line – dark chocolate,
expensive wine, reclining leather seats,
meat overcooked, view of the Rhein,
silken linen sheets.

He read my scurrying pressured intent
before I even worked the courage up,
deep in the woods of adulthood
I chased his words between the trees
and chased my own,
trembling, trembling. I would endure.

Went deeper still – a wolfy quest,
dragging my feet.
Began to see the signs – paw
prints, claw marks,
deep scars in trees. I traced them with itching palms,
heard their fiery song, strong
angry pounding in the leaves,
felt my hands begin to shake,
my knees to give, but the need to live,
to write, create
was stronger, so I swallowed fear,
put up my hood,
went skipping into that nameless wood,
knowing one day they’d find my cloak
in shreds, my patent leather shoes torn up in strips,
my red hair ribbons tread into the mud,
a few tell-tale drops of blood.
All that was left of
me.

The wolf met me at his door
“I’ve been expecting you.” he drawled,
with itching paws, toothy grin.
A weathered, matted, heavy coat – spoke of years of poetry
like Dylan, wanderer, like Kerouac.
I knew he wanted his childhood back.

I figured it was a fair exchange –
experience in return for youth,
my childishly frightened, chattering teeth
contrasting with that wolfy jaw.
My pale white hands never known a day’s work,
chipped purple nail varnish,
friendship bracelets
disappeared inside that wood.
Grew older, filled with words which flowed
like honey, treacle from my palms.

On their way out they met a trap –
the wolf’s long spider web, which stretched
like lazy washing lines all the way
from iron paws to the candycane door,
met the spider that lay in wait,
met the wolf’s curving claw as he plucked them,
and raised them slowly to his jaw.

I’d had enough.
I’d done my time – had mastered rhythm,
rhyme, enjambment, metaphors,
had now known love,
if you could call it that – they said to lose my soul,
(certainly done that) to a dead man.
So I took my gun and, whilst the wolf was sleeping,
blew a hole
in middle age’s belly, took some stones
to replace my honey words,
then left my soul
as offering to the wiser ones,
stitched up the wolf and fled
with bleeding footprints from the wood,
from mud which turned to grass to sand,
with ghostly words clutched tight
in pale white hands.

Do you know, after all that,
the one thing that gets to me most?
It’s that, when I left him, furry poet ghost, with stones inside
and formaldehyde
to cover the grave of my youth,
came out of the woods with a skip in my step
thinking finally, finally,
I had taken that step –
was a poet at last
could write
at last,
they called me a tart instead.

“They’ll be waiting.”
he nudges you, later,
as you lie in tender arms,
smiling in the dying shadow of Mephistopheles’ charms.
No alarm bells – there are no sirens
here. “It’ll do no harm,” you shake your head
ruefully, “to stay here for a while.”
“How long?” he cannot hide the hope.
The jagged slope leading up, back,
home, is somehow sprinkled with fear. “Say…
a year?”

“Really?”
suddenly he is all energy,
boundless hope, excitement, joy.
Sweet boy. “Really.” you promise,
a smile in your eyes. He believes your lies.
Because, really, how can you stay?
This is bliss, this personal hell,
this grey area, where daylight
is green from the grass above your head
and you live your own way
among the vivacity of the dead.
But it can’t last.

You are the sensible one,
the practical, think-things-through, serious one,
but as time goes on
and he loves you more and more and more
as you come to see happiness, always, as green,
as darkness, to you dances that thin line
between routine and new.
As you become at home in grey,
begin to dread the day,
begin to pray – not for salvation,
but for security – you can’t help yourself.
You begin to wonder.

What if?
And one day, when his adoring fingers
are plaiting with lovely doting care
into your maiden’s hair, and his lips are sighing
kisses on your heart, you crack.
Of course you can’t leave. Of course you can’t.
Because…

you love him.

That’s all it takes.
Suddenly, you’re on your feet, anxious
desperate now. You’re incomplete
alone, but with him…
somehow, he makes you, you.
He’s panicking, wondering what’s wrong.
You’re frantic, needy, happy.
You’ll work it out,
somehow you’ll stay. You’ll find a way,
even if it kills you.

And you do.
The forbidden fruit –
as old as time itself, or at least as old as woman.
Pouring through books you find a clause:
she who eats of Hades’ fruit
that’s it, the loot. The golden treasure –
all you have to do is
pluck
and you’re his.

One. Two. Three. Four.
More. You need more.
But before your definite tender hands
can touch that fifth seed to your lips,
the gates of your own personal hell
are flung wide, you see the sky, cringe away.
The green light of day is swallowed up,
that rugged slope thrown into light,
hell opened up
and you’re dragged back up into the mortal world.
Painful eyes open to reveal your mother,
desperate, caring, best interests at heart
in a haven of sickly green living mockery.
You close them, tight, only to find him
burnt like a sepia negative into the open wound of your soul
and eight final pomegranate seeds
lying in his lifeless hands
like pebbles on the graves of the dead.

An apple, single apple in her hand.
She looked and looked,
the snake from at her heels,
smirking, teasing, seducing –
“Oh, go on. Just one bite won’t hurt.
You know you want to.”

You see, she
was stuck in that garden
with nothing but a man
for years. And he
was no Brad Pitt,
I’ll tell you that –
no Tom Cruise, or Cary Grant.
And it gets boring, after a while
to garden, tend to plants,
with nothing else to do.
So she set to.
Bought endless books –
Einstein, Chaucer,
Tolstoy, Pasteur. All men.
Exceeded them.
Moved on, wrote her own –
under pseudonyms, of course.
(What man would ever read a woman’s work?)
Shakespeare, was her favourite,
Hemingway, another –
Joyce, Darwin, Aristotle. All were her.
Moved onto art: Da Vinci, Monet,
Picasso. Went Italian, English,
Spanish, German, French.
(And fluent, too, in languages of men)

But in that garden, Adam
wandered, mindless. Not knowing that his wife was off
opening galleries, drinking tea
with Van Gogh. Laughing with Queen Elizabeth
over a plate of scones –
Those men, they think we listen to them? The fools.
Came home,
late one evening, wearing a new dress
presented to her by Coco Chanel herself,
and Adam, blind as usual,
wondered what had changed.
“You’ve had a haircut? Painted your nails?
Bought new shoes?” No, no and no.
(She had said once, heavy with irony,
“Wouldn’t date him if he were the last man on the planet.”)
Thank God he was the first.

Eventually, tired of him, she sent him off –
“Go do something useful, please. Something men do,
like cut down trees, or eat, or something. Anything.”
So off he went,
and when he returned, apple smears round his mouth and newly clothed,
in possession of “intelligence”
and God stuck His nosy head down into her world
to reprimand them for eating the fruit
and Adam said “It was her! Not me! She
did it first – she’s the worst, punish her.”
God believed him.
Of course He did.
Kicked her out of that stupid garden,
and, her hand still sore from all that writing,
straight under this rosy glass ceiling.

And after that,
locked out of Eden,
with Adam trailing at her heels,
she smiled, because her secret lay
beneath the shadow of the tree:
that juicy, tempting, tender apple,
a doorstop at the gates of knowledge,
Snow White’s apple, Newton’s apple,
the golden apple of Hercules,
lies where it fell,
still in that garden,
whole –
untouched by woman’s lips.

Follow the crowd young girl and produce a pretty piece
Or turn away young girl, to where the lions do feast.
Or
You could make like a sheep
and morph to a
dot.
Better that than an a space which something unspoken of fills
Ellipsis…
a space which something unspoken of fills
a space which something unspoken of fills
a space which something unspoken of fills
Ellipsis…