New verse by Wellington writer Hera Lindsay Bird.
Keats Is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind
Keats is dead so fuck me from behind
Slowly and with carnal purpose
Some black midwinter afternoon
While all the children are walking home from school
Peel my stockings down with your teeth
Coleridge is dead and Auden too
Of laughing in an overcoat
Shelley died at sea and his heart wouldn’t burn
& Wordsworth……………………………………………..
They never found his body
His widow mad with grief, hammering nails into an empty meadow
Byron, Whitman, our dog crushed by the garage door
Finger me slowly
In the snowscape of your childhood
Our dead floating just below the surface of the earth
Bend me over like a substitute teacher
& pump me full of shivering arrows
O emotional vulnerability
Bosnian folk-song, birds in the chimney
Tell me what you love when you think I’m not listening
Wallace Stevens’s mother is calling him in for dinner
But he’s not coming, he’s dead too, he died sixty years ago
And nobody cared at his funeral
Life is real
And the days burn off like leopard print
Nobody, not even the dead can tell me what to do
Eat my pussy from behind
Bill Manhire’s not getting any younger
Photo courtesy of Rachel Brandon. Read more poetry from Hera Lindsay Bird here. Read an extraordinary interview with Hera Lindsay Bird by Steve Braunias here.
Hera’s debut poetry collection Hera Lindsay Bird (Victoria University Press, $25) is launched on July 14, and will surely be the biggest-selling and most talked about poetry book of 2016. It will be available at Unity Books.