Hannah Linden - Two Poems
Content Warning: grief, suicide, domestic abuse
The Whelping
from Wolf Daughter
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He said don't be sad but that's not what I heard through
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his black cloud. I know he thought I'd be better
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without him – that I figured in the middle of the long
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nights when the door was open and even though I
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couldn't step through, I gazed into his endless wake
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before he stopped his dream of sleeping. And when
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in that moment, light somehow found its way back
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I took off his shoes with their too-narrow heels
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and padded barefoot across the moonlit grass.
The Butcher
He could slice truth the same way a moon
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can be slivered into night, a tiny gleam
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of light on the back of a body's darkness.
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He could turn blood into make-believe pies
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– set them down next to a bowl of fruit. Let me
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peel that for you, he would say, his amazing voice
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mellifluous, even as he dissected your starfish
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heart. He could take your disconnected limbs
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wrap them in moss. So careful, so gentle.
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The songs he whispered, under his breath as he
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worked, were an orchestra's collected requiems –
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their candle notes, flickering on his tongue.
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But as I listened to the thuds of metal against flesh,
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as he hypnotised himself, blood dripping down
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his arms, a fly laid its eggs under my skin,
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hatched its truth somewhere he couldn’t find it.
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The meat of us rotting, though the room was
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always cold, though he sliced and tenderised.
Based in Devon, Hannah Linden has been published widely including or upcoming in Atrium, Lighthouse, Magma, New Welsh Review, Prole, Proletarian Poetry, Stand, The Interpreters’ House, Under the Radar and the 84 Anthology etc. She is working towards her first collection, Wolf Daughter which explores the impact of and recovery from parental suicide. Twitter: @hannahl1n
Photograph: A Mercurial Moon by Lisa Seidenberg
Lisa Seidenberg is an American filmmaker of documentaries and poetry films. Her work shows in international festivals. Currently, she is writing poems, an activity not attempted for many years. She visited the Acropolis in 2010 after the death of her father.