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Mandy Pannett
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| MANDY PANNETTALL THE INVISIBLESISBN 978-0-9568101-2-0
BEST AFTER FROST
Mysterious how the medlar ripens, softens, rots like Camembert – inexorable in its breakdown, this progress into mould.
A smutty fruit: Shakespearian – seaside picture- postcard rude, designed to raise a belly laugh with hints of bums and holes.
Blettir – the term for overripe, for this slimy slurpy process – such an atmospheric word, so French this aromatic feel of rainfall in Montmartre.
Rain and footfall; blood-red light: A tale where rain was far-off drumming; louder, thundering, tumbril wheels; a ripe and rotten group …
or not of blood but garnet-red: a medlar jelly sweet for Spring’s return. So suck this flesh and luscious rot: Best after frost, they say.
STUNTED
They say he lacks parental care. He wonders if that means the day his mother shoved him in the dustbin, kept him there with bricks to stop the lid …
A dark and raven world with holes no sweets can fill.
He knows a rock upon the moors that legend says was once a Troll. He likes this stunted, Nordic creature, gives it names and tells it jokes, sits down beside its stony base to nurse his welts and plot more stealing, shelters from the rain.
He has a penknife which he hones upon this troll to make the blade as sharp as every curse.
GLANCING AT LABELS
she sings the tune in a different key and the rhythm is faster and quite upbeat but the lyric’s not new and the theme’s the same and it’s always that guy from an earlier song who mattered and meant a lot to her then though her life’s moved on and he is not in it and love is a plaque high up on a wall that tells how a person once living is dead but the bricks exist and his name’s on a blue and white plate
so she scrapes some memories out of the rubble as if they were trinkets lost in the blitz and scribbles a phrase of heartache and rain as pub walls heave with calls for more bitter and she winds good strings on her old guitar though no one will listen and glances at labels on bottles of beer like hop garden gold and fiddler’s elbow spitfire and end of the world
| CATALOGUE
Poems for the Road by Nnorom Azuonye
Sentinel Annual Literature Anthology (2011) Editors: Unoma Azuah, Amanda Sington-Williams, Nnorom Azuonye.
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