Three Poems by Rachel Piercey

Alice and ‘prosecco with the girls’

Satire is not kind to ladies who love
prosecco and nor, sometimes, is Alice.
She hates the factory-farmed art prints
and the winky-face, we-get-you adverts —
but actual prosecco, with the actual girls,
now that is something else entirely.
It brings the whole world to a point
of feathery gold; it makes a matriarchy
of cushion-strewn living rooms and sticky-floored
pubs; it rushes, tidal, over circumstance,
over grudges and geography, over days of
disappointment and self-hatred. Alice had
a teacher, in school, who said that products
for the bathroom are sold in tall, fat bottles
because women (who do the shopping)
are drawn — atavistically, helpless —
to the signified phallus. Alice doesn’t know
if this is true, but this bottle, tipped up
to empty the alchemical dregs — oh no,
this bottle is a womb, with a bell-shaped
hold and an oceanic threshold to the light.
And Alice will fight, most days, for such
a so-recent liberty: a synchronicity of
women claiming leisure-time. Some days,
she’ll even fight for the gift-shop prints,
the etched glasses in frilly fonts, the wall-signs
with time frozen and bottles pictured mid-pop
because all right, ladies, we’ve earned this.
It’s prosecco o’clock.

Pigeons, people

Pigeons are nicer
in paintings.
The colour scheme
is all ‘Winged Humbug’
or ‘Very Nearly Dove’.

People, I think,
are sadder.
Is that nicer?

We can do well in
photographs: grasping at
the swathes of our moods,
to turn or tuck them into
something beautiful.

Think of the subject,
self-assembling
at the camera —
does it swell your heart?

Sometimes, stroking my nails
with scarlet gel,
I observe how ugly
each penultimate toe is,
and feel for myself
a great tenderness.

Knock, Knock

Someone came in the night
and carried off the plant pots

flanking our front door.
Two matching objects

on either side of a threshold
take upon themselves the quality

of guardians, and where some houses
have eagles, or lions, or hounds —

animals that can hunt you down —
ours were just flowers,

kittenish and fluttery,
pom-poms and scented notepaper

spelling out Welcome
and Be disarmed by beauty.

They will not avenge us.
They are swaying somewhere

in the back of a van, bound for
the houses of another county,

where the flower thief will give
a well-timed, early-afternoon knock

and a woman, home alone,
will be spun some yarn

about shows and leftover stock.
She will want to believe the best.

And she will want the unknown man
and his unmarked van

to leave, and she will pay
a few pounds for that —

and our candied bellis daisies,
our open-hearted violets

and full-skirted lobelias
will be a much nicer exchange

than she might have feared for.

Rachel Piercey is a poet, editor, and tutor for adults and children. Her third pamphlet, Disappointing Alice, was published by HappenStance in 2019; she also has two pamphlets with the Emma Press. Rachel’s poems have appeared in magazines including The Rialto, Butcher’s Dog, Anthropocene, Magma, and The Poetry Review. rachelpierceypoet.com