Poems by Rebecca Hawkes
Callow Country with Indoor Bloodsuckers
After Joanna Margaret Paul, Barrys Bay: Interior with Bed and Doll (1974), oil and watercolour on paper and hardboard
Boy, this one’s a scorcher. The whole landscape prowls, panting,
just beyond the front gate. In the maw of your mangy peninsula
the horses mow down scuffed-up grasses—browntop and cocksfoot—
and rub their matted itches against the gnarled plum trunk. Buffeted
by the hayfever nor’wester, your sheets have wrapped themselves
lumpenly along their line like a string of freshwater pearls. I catch
a sandfly doing devilishly bridal shadowplay in the folds of the lace
curtain. Strike at it forgetting the closed window behind. Now my hand
is bandaged and iced, and I thirstier for bloodshed than that schmear
of airy vampire. What other threats did that warping glass entrap
in here with us, and what is left pounding its hooves outside?
Beer Can Chickens
After Joanna Margaret Paul, Self Portrait/Still Life (1999), pencil, pastel
I am writing this while cooking a roast for eight people
or really I am not writing it given my busy hands
bound up in oven mitts or slick with seed oils and soap suds
slipping on the rhythm of the knife
the meditation of the potato peeler
that shears sugared ribbons of kumara skin
into the sink or the singing bowl
over which I am grating a solid cake of lemon pepper
so ancient it clotted metamorphic in its open sachet
scraping an index knuckle until I lose
some flecks of epidermis in the seasoning
and it is only while I am rubbing my own shredded skin into the
pinkly wrinkled surfaces of two chickens
that I remember there ought to be a poem at all
even as its longing notes evaporate into laughter
over the breakfast bar in the open plan kitchen
the people I love are playing
a complicated and duplicitous board game
that I aspire never to be convinced to join
but always to be around while they enjoy themselves
and I am cooking for us all I wash my hands often
it is a birthday more urgent than poetry
and the occasion demands ultimate poultry
without a tang of campylobacter
as I count the mounting kilowatt hours
with the oven on and nothing yet in it
I keep saying even when I’m not writing I am still writing
but this isn’t true and it doesn’t need to be
the truth is I cannot do anything
until I have also done everything else
when I stand back from my life will it all be here?
what I can usually manage is to glug a measured mouthful of beer
pop another can and swill half that back as well
feed minced garlic and ginger and celery
into open aluminium mouths
then stuff the beer cans disrespectfully
into the chickens’ most intimate cavities
trying not to spill the savoury slurry that will steam them tender
from the still lives of their unmysterious interiors
tugging waxen skin down around the cans
so feather stumps jut like poorly shaven pubes
on the groins of these saucy effigies the boozy chicks
offered in mass market martyrdom to the oven’s radiant hum
wash hands rinse dishes load racks
slice and salt and dress and shake the salad greens
and still no pen picked up no notes in my app
no poem
no right words thickening like gravy
amid the broil of the kitchen
perhaps I can write while the dishwasher goes on
hungrily sucking down our livelong filth like after dinner mints
before the rest of us have even eaten
look I wipe my hands on my apron
and I am finally writing a shopping list
onions, celery, lemon pepper, cornstarch
and I still haven’t told anybody how much I love and who
Rebecca Hawkes is a poet and painter from Methven. Her book Meat Lovers won Best First International Collection in the UK ecopoetry award the Laurel Prize, and was a finalist in the US-based LGBTQ Lambda Awards. She is an editor of the journal Sweet Mammalian and the climate verse anthology No Other Place to Stand. She will shortly burn down her life to pursue an MFA in poetry at the University of Michigan.