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PENGUIN MODERN POETS 3

The Penguin Modern Poets are succinct guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the curious reader and the seasoned lover of poetry to encounter the most exciting voices of our moment.

MALIKA BOOKER is a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. Her pamphlet Breadfruit was published by flipped eye in 2007, and her first collection, Pepper Seed, published in 2013 by Peepal Tree, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. She has written for the stage and radio, and was the first Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. She is currently a Douglas Caster Fellow at the University of Leeds.

SHARON OLDS was born in San Francisco. She was the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000 and currently teaches at New York University. She has been involved with outreach writing workshops at hospitals for the physically challenged and for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her collection Stag’s Leap won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize; her latest, Odes, was published by Cape Poetry in 2016.

WARSAN SHIRE is a Somali-British poet. Her pamphlets are Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011) and Her Blue Body (2015). In 2013 she won the first Brunel University African Poetry Prize. She was made the inaugural Young Poet Laureate for London in 2014 and served as Poet in Residence for Queensland, Australia, in 2014. In 2016 she collaborated with Beyoncé Knowles Carter on the film adaptation and poetry of the visual album Lemonade. Her work has been translated into several languages. Her debut collection is forthcoming from flipped eye publishing.

Malika Booker
Sharon Olds
Warsan Shire

YOUR FAMILY, YOUR BODY

MODERN POETS 3

PENGUIN BOOKS

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This collection first published 2017

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-98402-5

Red Ants Bite

1

You will be a whore just like your mother

Granny told me all the time,

like saying good morning.

I tried to make her love me,

but her mouth was brutal,

like hard-wire brush, it scraped me,

took skin off my bones, made me bleed

where no one could see,

so I’d shrink, a tiny rocking foetus.

You will end up on your back, scunt spread out,

feet sprawl out, whoring. Who tells a child that?

Yet I loved her. She was my granny,

and I wanted her to love me back,

but every day her words

put this hard thing deep inside me.

2

I wanted her to give me juicy mangoes and kisses,

I wanted pepperpot and tennis rolls;

she gave me rocks and hard stone,

pelted me each day, and I loved her still.

I told my doll that too much coconut oil

in Granny’s hair rancid her mouth.

I am grown and the smell of mothballs

curdles my stomach. I wanted mangoes and kisses:

You will be a whore just like your mother.

My father was her everything,

my brother her world.

Her daughters reaped zigar.

3

Her mouth spat, You black ugly scunt.

I was her black thick molasses, dunce and sour,

her burnt cassava. I was pone charred in the oven,

I was strong bitters, a brew better off unborn.

And I still wished her eyes could swallow me whole

the way they did my brother Philip. He would hug me

to transfer Granny’s glow to my world and I love him still.

Even when baby Kwesi came along, she never let go

of her apple-eye, but he never let go of us.

4

Yes! You red-skin, mixed-blood, nigger woman,

young, you were gold in Guyana’s sun,

your face a dark cream to my bitter chocolate,

eyes hazel like mine. We are kin, you and I.

Your blood pumps through me. How could you

scratch me so deep, leaving lacerations?

Yes, Jesse, tell me what hardened your heart

to your son’s first-born girl-child? Tell me,

Granny, now you dead, buried

in that Buxton graveyard, do you cuss me still?

Remember when Mummy went away

you came to stay at our house:

how I was your shadow; how I followed you,

wanting to fix the wrong you saw in me.

Your cruel tongue banished me to slide down

my wall in the corner crying, Oh meh Goy, why?

Granny, what I do to you, eh?

5

It was the house over by the Buxton train line,

the house with the wooden front steps

and the old white rocking chair, those stairs

where you followed Mum, heaping curses

like red ants’ bites, spewing Rasshole, scunt, whore.

Your son had outside women? So what!

Mum ran ashamed; necks craned from windows

as you peppered her skin with cuss,

till she flogged a taxi on the highway.

Years later Mum tells me the story

after I ask her to go back to Guyana with me.

The entire plane journey Mum mutters, Wicked woman.

We walk up those same wooden stairs,

the divorced wife, the scarred granddaughter.

At ninety-six you could claim fifty years,

that day I saw you sit in the rocking chair,

saw my mother part your hair, pour coconut oil,

massage, then plait, her fingers caressing strands.

It’s water under the bridge, she tells me later.

I can’t talk past the words buried deep,

can’t talk past the men I froze beneath,

your words branded under the skin

inside my thighs, legs spread like a whore.

Oh mother, humbled I watch you

plait the hair of an old woman

I wanted to love me years ago.

6

Jesus look where you brought me from,

I was down in the world doing what I please

But look where you bought me from …

He had me one and let me go,

I don’t know why Satan let me go …

Caribbean Gospel – Jump for Jesus.

I lived till me turn one hundred and one,

live through back-break in backra sun.

I was a slave baby mixed with plantation white.

This creamy skin draw buckman, blackman,

coolieman, like prize. And if you did hear sweet talk,

if you did see how much fine fuck I get.

Is hard life, hard, hard life and only one son I bear.

My mother tell me to kill di girl child dem –

they only bring hard ears. Jessie, harden you heart

to them girl. But I tell you, Miss, I never kill no child,

and is one boychild I breed, only one, then pure girls.

I didn’t right to vex?

I was the lone woman every man want to advantage,

I had was to sharpen meh mouth like razor blade,

turn red in seconds till bad word spill blood.

Scunt-hole child, you want sorry?

Jessie Spenser never tell a soul sorry when she live,

you sure not getting one now me dead.

Wait for that and you go turn dust.

And what I ever do you, Missy?

I ever fire licks like rain scatter on ground

in rainy season pon you skin? No.

I tell you nuff ole higue story on back stairs.

I toughen you soffie-ness, mek man can’t fuck you

easy so. So fuck off, leave the dead some peace.

Pepper Sauce

I pray for that grandmother, grinding her teeth,

one hand pushing in fresh hot peppers, seeds and all, turning

the handle of that old iron mill, squeezing the limes, knowing

they will burn and cut raw like acid.

She pours in vinegar and gets Anne to chop five onions

with a whole bulb of garlic,

Chop them up real fine girl, you hear?

And Anne dicing, and crying, relieved that no belt has

blistered her skin,

no knife handle smashed down onto her knuckles

until they bleed for stealing money from she grandmother

purse.

I hear she made Anne pour in the oil and vinegar

and stir up that hot sauce, how she hold her down.

I hear she tied that girl to the bedposts,

strung her out naked, like she there lying on a crucifix.

I hear she spread she out, then say,

I go teach you to go and steal from me, Miss Lady.

I hear she scoop that pepper sauce out of a white enamel bowl,

and pack it deep into she granddaughter’s pussy,

I hear there was one piece of screaming in the house that day.

Anne bawl till she turn hoarse,

bawl till the hair on the neighbour’s skin raise up,

bawl till she start hiss through her teeth,

bawl till she mouth could make no more sound,

I hear how she turn raw,

how that grandmother leave her there all day,

I hear how she couldn’t walk or talk for weeks.

Saltfish

My mother wanted to boil the salt out of the fish,

so much harsh salt, then chip that saltfish smaller

and smaller, so she could cope with the hawked spit

of her patients, their hatred gutting her raw

so that some days she wanted to tell them,

It’s only skin, we bleed the same underneath,

but she held it in. Some days she wanted to crawl

back into her mother’s belly, her little island home