This week’s poem is from Rebecca Perry’s collection little armoured, winner of the 2011 Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize.
“little armoured is a brilliant book, which emits light and heat like the electric heater one of its poems describes as
a humming like a bee in the corner
of the room, its orangeness
brighter than your eyes expect.
Its miniatures and transforming images sometimes recall Elizabeth Bishop, its tonally various sequences Paul Muldoon, but this is a young poet who already discovered her own voice in these exact and tender, smart and moving poems.“
– John McAuliffe
The woman in the sun, a letter
I want my feet to tingle with cold again.
I want to be cold with you.
I want you to put your hands between my thighs in bed,
and I would clench them tight for you,
like daisies in a flower press.
I want to press my nipples onto your shoulder blades,
and leave tiny licks of saliva on your back, cold as skis.
I am full of tears.
All day they roll out of my eyes
and fizz to nothing by my feet.
They splash my breasts and for a second it is dark there,
then no. I am dry. I am a pillar of salt.
My body is warmed from the inside out.
My stomach is molten inside my body,
my lungs bubble from the heat of it,
my heart in your hand would be like
taking a potato straight from the oven,
my bones are the wood of a campfire,
my skin is bed sheets slept in for a day and night.
