Four Poems by Linda Black

A miniature lady

Loses her head, her hair a pointed spire, face the shape of an apple pip. Her bodice is a heart, her arms are loose, adrift from her torso. She tilts, on a journey backwards. One of her kind breezes past, eyes awake, waving a length of balloons. There’s a gift on the floor, bandaged.

Spikes

In the ground, small forks pitching. How hard is the earth, how narrow? Are these words or images? Immaterial.

Paucity, strapped on the back – bent and bowed and stripped of comfort. Sac–sac–sacrifice. Blurt it out. Build a prison, a misery mountain. Turn aback – the spent hour, mumbled thought (lost epiphany). Sorrow yearns from a wicker chair.

Her legs are weak

A line embeds itself between her ears, through her glottis, down her little humped back. To her right, a three-legged table leans into the fireplace against the grate. Atop, a perspex bowl – quadripartite, handle arched and twisted – and a fluted glass dish (What do you do? she fluted). There’s a lady underneath beside the abandoned fourth leg. A pointed toe, a crack in her neck.

I have a nice piece of watercolour paper

I sketch out a scene – a grand old hall hung with portraits (male), crinoline ladies caged in whalebone, hooped skirts set alight. I have by my side a scrap of newsprint on which are blobs of paint. I pick them up with the back of a spoon. It’s beginning to take shape nicely – soaking and spreading in its own way, weeping into the damp paper. I’m adding to the frame – dark liver reds. I want gold. I am starting to panic.

Linda Black is a poet and a visual artist. She is Editor of Long Poem Magazine. She has published four collections with Shearsman Books, the latest being Then (2021), a combination of verse and prose poems. A collection of ekphrastic poems is forthcoming. The Son of a Shoemaker (Hearing Eye, 2012), collaged prose poems about the early life of Hans Andersen, plus the author’s illustrations, was the subject of a Poetry Society exhibition. Her work has appeared in many journals, and anthologies, most recently Dreaming Awake (MadHat Press, 2023), Alcatraz (Gazebo Books, 2022) and Prose Poetry, An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2020). The beating of wings (Hearing Eye, 2006) was the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2007. She won the 2006 New Writing Ventures Award for Poetry and received the 2004/5 Poetry School Scholarship.