Lynn Foote
Biography - click to expand
West Cumbria
Lizzie pulls her knickers down
shouts bugger off
at her son who’s come to visit.
I’ll pee here, she says.
Mum sits in someone else’s cardigan.
I check to see she’s got
her teeth so that she can eat.
All round, a hectic gobbling.
We have come so far
in the Windermere Ward
that there’s nowhere left to fall.
Winchester City Mill
Engaged in the Mill Race, the stream smashing
into the two channels, curdling, rushing,
black and angry under the metal walkway:
you wouldn’t want to get caught up in it.
A trickle of wheat through the hopper
between the millstones, is ground down
to a fine, soft, mildewey consistency,
barely brown, a powder more than a grain.
I taste it on my palm and it’s harmless:
the water-wheel is thrashed, sluiced round,
tossing the water into Hokusai waves,
and everything is in the gears, cog into wheel –
even the cars powering home down the M3
(diesel not steam) – but still the simplicity
of spindle to damsel; the forked tongue
of the river split as if by a Cambodian exorcist.
Blood and Feathers 11
(after the film by Ana Mandieto)
When she has poured the libation
over her body, she rolls in feathers
as if sifting through them, or luxuriating
in a bath, cat-like, and I imagine the globules
sticking, the smell of metal, then feel myself
feathering and recall first, the story John told me
of how foxes bring a kill back to the cubs
who tear the birds to bloody bits, wallowing in it -
and second, the temple outside Kathmandu,
its pink flowers, channels running with gore,
and as the Saturday morning grew on, the scent
sweetening and sickening, until I was almost
one with it; the scene, the sun, the boy-men grinning,
the goats’ hooves against the rope, the slashing
of the chickens’ throats, the incense
thrown and that smell, the hot ochre!
Photo, Femmes, Fėminisme
(after the exhibition at the Librairie des Bibliothèques February 2011)
In a corner of the Place de la Concorde
a model who looks like a yellow sail is surrounded:
gamine-like creatures crouch. In the Tuileries
it’s cold when the sun goes in. Lorna says it’s great
there are no leaves, then you can really see the sky:
god, are those age-spots on her hands or freckles?
Into the Marais, past our friend’s old flat, whose mind
couldn’t have predicted what’s happening to it.
The poster’s visible yards away: the Hendrix trilby,
the slouched fag, the woman pointing in a long cardigan,
Pape...le respect. It couldn’t be anyone but us, I say.
.My knee clicks. Sian says she fancies reading in the Cimitière
and I imagine her outside a tomb, as if on a porch,
book in hand, waiting for a tap on her shoulder.