THE BONE STAIRCASE

Collection of poems by Kerry Priest (Poet, Dramatist, Sound Artist and Mother)

Skin

Tonight she overhears her heart pulse

in the kitchen, a polyrhythm to the clock's

interminable stalking of the sleeping sun.

The regalia are waiting: syringe, hormone, wet wipe.

At nine pm precisely, she holds up the syringe

to the light, draws 250 ml from the vial.

The skin of a drum

summons the animal

it is made from.

Some know how to make a drum,

stretch soaked deer skin

over a bent rose willow frame

spend two nights in a trance

where the white and red rivers meet.

She does not know this.

Here's how she burrows between the worlds:

Pinch some tummy chub, pierce

the membrane of skin,

push the liquid,

hold the needle in for five beats.

Alice through the Embryoscope

Behold the primordial pea,

Alchemists called me Shamayim

a silvery world machine.

Not much to look at, I agree

but I’m dense with sense,

unshakeable as a dream.

~

Already,

I predict a life to come,

all

those

trails

that

will

lead

back

to this

singularity,

this point of expansion.

~

I am giddy with freedom.

I must be human already.

My first choice, though,

is the big one.

~

Dead/alive,

What am I?

-Schroedinger’s dot.

All you’ve got.

~

Please, don’t call me the ouroboros.

I’m far too tiny and too porous.

besides, I’m growing,

paring

~ flowering

into a double

bubble.

~

W

h

e

!

~ on day three

I dive

into the vortex change.

I am a chaos of waters, stirred white

~

then I shrink to nothing.

No.

Not nothing.

Nearly nothing.

~

Almost unmanisfest,

I zip down meaty tubes

to behind the prism walls,

the sudden architecture of my body

crystallizing into a palace.

The embryologist

calls me Blastocyst.

I will be a baby.

Or a very

near

miss.

Belly

Oh squat god,

protector-ogre

of my sealed-in life,

your solemn eyemouth

once sprouted a vine

that attached me

to my mother's insides.

Fat statue in the desert

standing stout,

your button

a single hooded eye,

with a baby for a mind,

I yield to your knowing.

Old skin face,

tell me again

how I am a nothing

in history's deep dream

and how we're all born

from this same African gourd.

Womb

I am looking at a tree.

I regurgitate my tea and the water rushes up into the tap. It’s getting earlier and earlier. Soon, we are reversing around the Dordogne as summer flies unpick themselves from the windscreen.

Mum and Dad’s ashes turn to flesh in Rotherham crematorium as they go back to exhaling cigarettes and un-watching Crime-watch in a series of bungalows. Meanwhile, at the London Olympics everyone is running backwards. Fewer and fewer people are tapping at computers which are getting slower and slower, as their modems get louder and louder. East London is getting worse. Camden Town is getting better. Canary Wharf is getting lower, Brixton is getting blacker. I go back to university, unmeet my husband, the millennium comes in an implosion of fireworks.

In Berlin, spray paint peels off the wall, liquefies, is sucked into a can. The same thing happens in New York, where everybody is breakdancing. Suddenly, a lot of my friends are getting really small. They are stuffed back, scream-inhaling into the wombs of their scream-inhaling mothers. Somehow, I am still here and hair is being cut longer. The Beatles are back together and all their records are spinning backwards. Except the ones with hidden satanic messages, which are spinning forwards.

Soon, my mother is pushed back into grandma’s womb and women everywhere leave factories and start unpicking their knitting. Hemlines get lower and lower and dresses suddenly puff to a sheen as everything gets slower and slower, but there are still wombs. Marie Antoinette finds her head. Men wear wigs, then tights and Columbus or the Vikings lose America. The Mongols and Muslims and Goths and Christians and Romans retreat, retreat, cities disappearing. Cleopatra brushes off her make-up.

Wheat fields grass over, ceramics turn to clay, stone circles are dismantled, cave artists brush ochre back onto pallets and it’s wombs and wombs all the way until the last few people hop back across the savannah, their arms getting longer and longer.

The trees welcome them back.

Kerry Priest is a poet, dramatist, sound artist and mother. Her poetry has been published by Acumen, Dark Mountain, Emma Press, Eyewear and Poetry Salzburg Review. She is an emerging playwright at the Minack theatre. Her sound pieces are influenced by Polyphony and Shamanic practice. She has performed at Royal Festival Hall, Bestival and Latitude.

Recent commissions include everything from creating plugins which turn a woman’s voice into a stag beetle’s mating call, a polyphonic poetry play for the Minack Theatre, and a sound sculpture made of sheep’s bones. www.kerrypriest.com

She gave birth to baby Astrid in 2020, after nine years of trying and three rounds of IVF.

"I wrote the poem "Womb" as an attempt to redress the erasure of the feminine from history. It is strange to think how little we, as a species, talk about the womb, even though every one of us has lived in one for nine months of our life. It is the single experience that all of humanity shares. "Womb" is the closing poem of my sequence about ancestry and IVF called “The Bone Staircase.””

Invisible Motherhood

Lizzy would like to invite you to help her create a platform of stories and artistic responses to invisible aspects of motherhood. This can live on the Mothers Who Make website as a resource and to support visibility for motherhood experiences . If you would like to share something or start a conversation about something you would like to make please get in touch lizzy[@]motherswhomake.org