Early Purple Orchid & Blushing Bracket Fungus
QUEEN GERTRUDE:
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
I clutch,
my knuckles pale eggs
swaying on bare branch.
I clench the soft underbellies
of my palms
into bark.
I was reaching for
something — a catkin probably — when I lost
my foothold on the trunk.
My hands launched themselves
like wings
until they landed,
and now here I find myself,
swinging
and dangling
face to face with clots of brackets —
touch one and it blushes;
pinch it, and it bleeds.
They must be
the fingers
of some other creature
who hung here before me
until the heavy flutter
of its body
split the stitching
of its seams so that it left its fingers
clinging,
dropped,
kicking
like a limb,
into the stream.
Sweet Violet
LAERTES:
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring!
He inhales my soul into his mouth.
Poor Hamlet strays all disarranged into my closet while I am stitching violets
onto my pillowcase. The needle wings itself away and crawls into the
carpet when he grips me by the wrist and gnaws his beetling eyes
straight through my face and shakes. I lapse into a lump of
sugar dissolving on his tongue, slide aslant as if sucked
underwater, like the posy Persephone dropped into
the Styx when she was snatched. The floor is
opening vast jaws like that and swallowing.
Strange, I never feel him let go of my
arm, but when he’s gone, I find
five fingertip-sized violets
blushing in the skin
beneath my
sleeve.
Michelle Szobody is a British-American poet and translator with an interest in marginalisation in literature and renegotiating the canon to promote inclusivity and ecology. Her work has been published on both sides of the Atlantic, was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and won an IPPY award in the US. She was recently Guillemot Press’s poet in residence at The Causley Trust and is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Bristol.