Advice

 

I first kissed the mechanic’s son

breathlessly against a garage door.

His calloused hands left dark stains

on my blouse, though his mind

 

was a whiteboard of equations;

he dreamt in permanent marker

as I pencilled soft grey butterflies

in the back of my exercise book.

 

When I showed him one of my poems

at break, he said: “It is chaos, good

God. Before you start, know clearly

what it is you wish to communicate.”

 

 

B29 Superfortress Crash Site, Bleaklow

 

Open a car bonnet, and you’re struck

by the yellow and the red and the green wires

packed in as neatly as a lunchbox.

 

Glimpsed accidents at the roadside

couldn’t prepare you for the aeroplane’s

myriad of secret parts:

 

the russet punch

of humpbacked cogs, half

submerged in peat, the pipes and the sheet metal

and the stump of bronze propeller, curious

as the deep-sea diving helmet

you once saw

in a dusty museum,

all solemn, diamond-paned

portholes.

 

And each piece blasted

so far wide of the draftsman’s

painstaking design.

The discrepancy

 

between the biology textbook

and the body on the operating table –

                                           a bloom of organs

                                                         so very red.

 

I have taken the scissors to my history textbook

 

I begin at the back of the classroom.

No one notices the tiny tear

of page corners, heaped on my desk

in white confetti. I blow them

 

like this, or cut out page numbers

and scatter the black seeds

across rain-soaked playing fields.

I slice paragraphs into words

 

and words into letters,

rearrange them like fridge magnets.

The joy of infinite possibility.

I ink out entire paragraphs.

 

When a girl in the year above flicks

a lighter, shows me how to burn holes

in plastic, I make blisters bubble

like a ruck of volcanoes

 

across its protective cover.

I've learnt the knack of ripping paper

cleanly, so it falls from its binding,

as meat from a bone.

 

My teacher stops teaching

as her eyes lock on the carcass

and asks me what’s happened.

I tell her it is for accuracy’s sake.

 

 

Sophie Clarke is studying for an MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford. She was one of ten commended poets in the ‘Seeing Further: Poems on the Underground Competition’ 2010, and was a commended Foyle Young Poet in 2007. She has been published in a variety of places, including Pomegranate, Popshot and Fuselit, and has recorded poems for PoetCasting. She guest-edited the latest issue of the Poetry Society's youth magazine.