Nicki Heinen
Biography - click to expand
Nicki Heinen was born in Germany and studied at Girton College Cambridge, where she won the Barbra Wrigley Prize for Poetry. She was published in the 10th Anniversary of the May Anthologies, edited by Andrew Motion, and in the Oxford Magazine. She has also written for the Birmingham Post and Fashion Insider Magazine. Her play ‘Spin’ was performed by theatre company Write by Numbers at the Ovid Reworked festival in Brixton in 2010. Recent readings have included the Girton Poetry Festival and Speakeasy in Peterborough. She currently lives in London and is on the MA Creative and Life Writing Course at Goldsmiths College.
The Crows at Chatressac
You are sunk black.
Thin bones,
Feathered unkindly,
Black scratched.
I say to you in your mother tongue -
Vous planez comme des spectres,
Vous m’enserrez,
Vous êtes fûtez.
Trespassers,
You are cloudy as shrouds,
You eat light
Flying to it with revulsion.
You make a noise like time travel,
You nibble at rebels for breakfast.
Quick as feet.
Sharp as flint.
Soot speckled peach.
Ants on a blushing cheek.
Such an explosion,
Shattered slate into spilt blood,
You fly, fly, against red ribbons blowing,
Flying into the bony wind,
Flint lifting smoothly like a skyscraper elevator.
You caw, caw with black beak,
Flick flick punch your wings,
They are steered silently.
You scream graaw, graaw,
Beak picking at scraps of ligament
Sharply, messily,
So that blood stains mud and rubble.
When the sun falls red and gold
Into the dip in the horizon beyond the sodden marshes and the little boats,
You make a bleak picture
Scattered like coarse pepper across the sky.
We make illogical companions
But I wouldn’t have you gone,
Death crow,
Because you remind me of my shadow -
Immeasurably temporal, claustrophobic,
As much part of me
As you are free.
If you turn on me I will hide and my shadow will tussle with you.
When you fly in clusters
Out of the tree by my window
I’ll throw plum stones at you.
You fly, fly loose, high, mechanically
There are creaks in your feathered armour,
Bats are gripping at your wings.
Oh black princes!
Wresting the bloodstain from the sky
You pierce like smoked glass.
Death machine,
You will have the run of the skies.
Ghost princes,
The sun is overcome with scattering pains, with fear.
Forgive me my hands, my beating heart, my pale skin
You fight with the sun and win.
14 ways of looking at the colour white
Around you a necklace of teeth
To put it in, a thin plastic bag, just emptied
Ripped feather, light wind
At the edge of the road, December
Streetlamp blinking, 5 a.m
Fog that gets in your nostrils
Cracked china in the soil
Roots growing there
While the piece-of-shit radiator rattles
Eyes in the Old Master
Aspirin, downed
Sick dawn
Bleached ink
Page turned.
Hampton Court, January 15th 1559
On the eve of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth 1st
Shoes junk rubies all over the dark
and stain the grass.
She’s dreamless.
Hands like doves.
Men swarm and fawn in her mind,
her sides are bruised.
Seas curl in the corridors of her mind,
currents play in rooms.
Dead air rustles her name, whispers secrets in her ear.
She shrinks into the mossy seat,
the moon a sceptre behind her arm.
‘Listen, old moon.
Keep my confidences silently’
Sweeps aside damp skirts.
Gold for grass.
Leaves are suet under foot.
Tree bark is brocade.
The air thickens with rain.
Water swells silks and pearls,
runs through cracked whale-bones.
The rain seeps into her skin like scent.
Her hands drown in her flooded lap,
droplets dress her head.
He said speak
Parvati to Shiva
I am here before you
I am here
I am here before
I am here before you
I am here before you in the rain, under every drip
I am here before you in the snow, shivering up to my neck
I am here before you in the storm, when it breaks hard
I am here before you at dawn with the first bird
I am here before you at night chasing grass as it blows
I am here before you in the hot wind, sand under my eyelids
I am here before you when the ice shatters under my foot
I am here before you
I am here before
I am here
I am
I
I am here before you.
Evolution
I have old bus tickets and a blue lighter in my pocket;
You look at me.
My face is an advert for loneliness
And I know that you will forget me when I say hello.
I say hello.
Your hands are weapons.
They make me feel breakable
And alive.
The flames of the fire
Fight, flicker; Plato's cave
(Are shadows more beautiful?)
I am drunk.
You say to me:
Why are you here?
I am here
And I wish I were not here.
I wish I were anti-matter,
An atom in a far-strung galaxy
Waiting for a black hole to engulf me
So I can cease to exist
Like candy cigarettes
Or the Bali tiger, though I guess that would still be here if it had a choice.
I am failing at evolution in ways that a tiger cannot comprehend.
I do not know you.
I will never know you.
I say goodbye
(Saying it softly so that you might know it hurt - you didn’t)
Then the bowels of London spit me out.
I find myself in a familiar room
With a familiar bed but
Everything is grey.
Am I dead?
You are perfect but
You have killed everything I once loved.
You have made me hate
My acceptable life
Because it will never include you.
In the dark, my heart sinks to my feet
And my stomach sticks to the sheets.
I know that you have forgotten me already.