My father died in 2010, my life forever divided into before and after. Dealing with his loss wrecked parts of myself I had constructed haphazardly, like the mask I had pressed to my face that I thought made me invincible, untouchable and mysterious. God help me, it slipped from my grasp, shattering at my feet like porcelain when he died, its pieces scattered all over. I felt raw and red. Less loved.
I have always written poetry but was afraid to commit to it, hiding behind writing about others’ work. Death clarifies things, and now that my mask had smashed, I couldn’t stop writing about my father. I grasped at snatches of memory, the intonations of his voice, his funny turns-of-phrase, so I could keep him here with me encased in the resin of my words. The poems from this period form part of my pamphlet, White Whale (Southword Editions, 2015).
Following its publication, I was struck by how ill-equipped and fragile I was when confronted with an event I could not control. I picked up the broken pieces of my mask and examined each one in turn. I cut myself many times but came to see how each sharp fragment formed part of a complex coping mechanism I had fashioned, a process which had begun when I was a child.
Back then, I had not made the connection between words and their multiple meanings – lamb in the field, lamb for dinner; chicken with chicks, chicken and chips. I wondered, and wonder still, what else I might have missed. Poetry then is an act of urgency for me; it provides an angle from which I can survey lacunae in my understanding, while its figurative elements supply material to generate a replica of my interiority. It is an act of conversion; I melt down my tempers into something molten to pour into the cracks.
Turning up the heat reveals that my concerns are, and not just as a writer, embedded in acts of consumption, replacement and resistance. For example, deciding to become a vegetarian at six, in hindsight, was an attempt at control but also a rebellion. I couldn’t live with myself if my life depended on suffering and death; nor did I, even then, want to be judged as a woman. Such restriction is, as I found in my writing, a response to the paralysing fear of growing up, of sexuality, of death, and of shame, particularly as I come from an Irish Catholic background.
After White Whale, which felt both revelatory and a prelude, I started writing from the root of these anxieties. Reconstructing the shards of the broken mask conversely exposed the veracity of experience beneath. I fused these jagged pieces back together with words in my approximation of the Japanese art of Kintsugi or ‘golden joinery.’ Language allows for this. Poetry allows for this, and the poems took shape, text written to repair the fissures, to make something new, bolstered by the art and profound feminist anger of my poetry godmothers: Plath, Sexton, Olds, Clifton, Boland, Berry and Seuss among them.
Poetry created out of necessity resonates with me, written in the only way it could be written. The incendiary images of Sylvia Plath and the audacious truths of Anne Sexton, the assembled worlds of Emily Berry’s books: their poems put things together to create shapes which engage and can be trusted. My poems are written in the only way I could write them – to be true. Among other things, they are a belated farewell to a difficult, extended girlhood and an embrace of a more complex – but I hope, healthier – womanhood. This journey didn’t start until my world broke apart and that mask fragmented, but the funny thing is that my mask never really worked anyway. Everyone saw me, except myself.
Sitting alone in the house eating
my fingernails/watching the sky
move away. The room is full/versions of me
crouching on the floor/balancing on the window sill/
reclining on the pout of my lower lip/
asleep in the crease of my eyelid.
Not alone/with myself/A snare /I have been
running from I do not live
the way humans are supposed to,
compare my face to others you know.
I fall short/an embarrassing fringe/No matter
what face I try on it’s exhausting.
All versions shake our heads.
There is much to do/until we think we are not
What We Are: Victoria(s). I see
those letters written on envelopes I know
are for me because of the shape
of that word/that greedy V –
its two arms open wide/ready
to accept anything.
As a toddler,
Krishna ate clay
for fun,
his worried mother
prying open his mouth
felt herself whirling in space, lost
inside that baby mouth
the whole universe,
moving and unmoving creation.
The earth, its mountains and oceans,
moon and stars,
planets and regions
and the child Krishna
with his wide-open mouth
and her kneeling
before him, and within
that mouth another
universe
and within
that mouth
another
universe
and within
that mouth
another
universe
and within
that mouth
another.
Eat,
he said, holding out
the mud
in his chubby hand,
and so on,
or we both starve.
She opened wide, kept
her tongue flat. The substance
was thick
and active.
She did not know
what she was
tasting,
she swallowed
and felt
full.
At first I thought that enormous lump of red-brown on the sand
was the trunk of some ancient, washed-up tree.
It was only when I mounted the object,
digging my small hands into something far too pliable,
that it really hit me, the stale smell of a thousand low tides
and the mute open mouths of the many onlookers
with their hysterical dogs, the seagulls circling like squalling clouds,
my mother’s curlew scream as she ran towards me, disjointed.
Astride the whale like this,
looking at my mother move through dimensions,
planes of distance,
I thought of boutique dressing rooms brimming
with clothes and tension, like gas, expanding. And of two little girls
watching their mother cry at her reflection distorted in a fluorescent mirror.
The weight of her past made flesh on her hips,
the scars of our arrivals barely healed after all this time,
my blind hands all over the body.
Grasping, desperate to hold onto something real,
not knowing what that was.
I sucked marrow from bones at dinner,
my father’s face a bloody grin of pride. I ate liver in chunks
for breakfast, pink and firm, jewels to adorn my insides.
I gloried in the feel of flesh, the exertion of the chew.
Holding my mother’s hand in the English Market,
I saw them – turkey chandeliers, plucked,
bruised purple eyelids dainty lightbulbs.
Their smell, fresh as the insides of my mouth.
Mother stroked my hair. There, there. I refused to eat
meat, became pillowy, meek. She hid muscle under mashed potato,
I tasted its tang in soup. Eat up, my parents said. I could not
swallow. My skin goose-pimple yellow, doctors drew blood
in tiny, regular sips. Teeth turned to glass and shattered
in my mouth. All I could taste was blood.
In the nightclubI drank
Peach Schnappswith ice
my hearta nest of eggs
I wantedall of you
to seemy tender belly
and not beashamed
I showedonly peacock eyes
my big fuchsiamouth
I wantedto fill up
with the floppy complianceof beautifulwet tongues
flashingin and out
under lightsOutside
afterkissing someof you
or trying toample
for allof you
I sucked chipssalty and bitter
gathered thosewho remained
starvingtoo drunk to walk
homeinto a circle
AroundI went parting
lipspushing masticated potato
onto the dentof yourplump tongues
My salivain your stomachs
(stirring)
My pulse inyour necks
(hatching)
*
Bulldozers disturb the old workhouse site,
uncover babies’ skulls
curved like tiny moons. Their mothers
beside them, lullabies
locked in their jaws.
*
They can measure hunger now. Test
how much bellies rumbled, the stress
teeth were under, rotten
before they broke
scurvied gums.
*
Mothers exhausted their own bodies
to produce milk. High nitrogen
evidence of body tissue
breaking down,
recycling.
*
The starving
human
literally
consumes
itself.
*
Babies died
anyway. They all died. Wasted away
like potatoes
in the ground. The whole
country rotten.
*
What was left buried in memorial gardens,
alongside statues to honour hunger:
children with milky fat
teeth in braces.
All we do now is eat.
Ugolino, locked up
with your children in that tower,
dreaming you were all wolves
hunted and torn to pieces, gnawing
at your fingers in grief or hunger.
The only sound that of doors
being nailed shut. What did you do
when they begged you to eat them?
When they cried out, Stop our suffering.
You brought us into being dressed in this sad flesh,
now strip it all away. Their scrawny limbs reaching
towards you, heads limp with exhaustion,
a lack of light. Four dead children,
you so blind by the sixth day you spoke
to them as though they were alive. Hunger,
you say, proved stronger than grief.
I am on my knees.
Find him –
Was that his bald head bobbing,
a candle-flame on my horizon –
the scar a tell, upside-down horse shoe
with all the luck spilled out.
The earth is eating
my family up –
it practises sucking at the soles
of my shoes. I can’t resist pressing
my fingers into its soil, smearing muck
on my face, war paint. But I’m a loser,
my father died when I wasn’t looking.
Careless, I’ve mislaid
my keys again. I buzz around
a stupid bluebottle bouncing off
walls, where are they?
Where is he? I hit my head on a shelf.
I swear I have left my body –
then you let me see, St. Anthony,
I’m broke from you and now
a gift given back –
a missing leopard print sock,
the lost gold earring,
my keys and now –
his clear white bones
licked clean, burning the ground.
I get up; the scar dissolved, the candle quenched,
there. There he is –
I never imagined that
in Arrowhead when I encouraged you to purchase
a set of engravings of the whale and Ahab that
they would end up six years later
in your airy Dublin apartment,
the one that you share with your Canadian girlfriend.
‘Look,’ you say when I visit
for the first time,
‘we hung the whale above the fireplace.’
You have left the bedroom door open and I see
the other picture hangs easily over your white bed.
Life, perverse origami, folds and twists and shapes itself
so that in your apartment, my coat lies on your crisp sheets.
I watch it from the living room,
beached upon that ivory shore,
as I sip weak tea.
Dearest Camille,
I want you; I want you to take skin
from my back, my shoulders,
skin that covers my breasts.
The highwayman James Allen
covered a memoir with his hide, a gift
to a brave man he tried to rob.
The judicial proceedings of murderer
John Horwood are sandwiched
in his largest organ.
Anatomy texts are bound
with skin of dissected cadavers,
de Sade’s Justine et Juliette has nipples.
I want to cradle Les Terres du Ciel
between my thighs, my soul
passing from planet to planet. To be
a citizen of the sky, cross its universe faster
than light, touch that jagged lunar crescent,
see Saturn glowing scarlet and sapphire.
You think me frivolous, a society woman.
You are wrong. I know constellations will reign
in noise before existence, stars burn after our sun
dies. I want a world covered with telescopes.
Earth is only a chapter, less than that, a phrase,
less still, a word. Let me carry it.
1. Hunger Strikes Catherine of Siena (1347–1380)
My sister taught me how.
Oh Bonaventura, they wanted
me to marry him, the slack-jawed widower.
I vomited twigs, hid in the convent,
wore a widow’s habit. The other nuns complained
until at twenty-one I met Him.
He presented me with a ring fashioned from His skin.
Told me this sliver of flesh bound us,
wait, He told me, promising it would be special.
I levitated; only ate His body, others did not
understand how good it was
to kiss His holy prepuce.
Oh, Bonaventura, I am a house of sticks,
my bones rattle with desire until I lick it.
I feel it quiver, alive on my tongue.
2. Hunger Strikes Angela of Foligno (1248–1309)
I drink pus from wounds of the unclean.
Christ, it is like water to me, sweet
as the Eucharist.
I pick
at their scabs, chew them flat
between my teeth.
The lice I pluck and let drown
on my tongue sustain me.
Lord, I am the Host.
Lead me in the light
to the summit of perfection.
I will pray and pray
and pray to you: to remain poor,
be obedient, chaste and humble.
This is all I ask. God-man, feed me.
3. Hunger Strikes Veronica Giuliani (1660–1727)
My confessor ordered her to do it,
the novice kicked me again and again.
Her shoe pummelled my teeth,
bloodied my lips. I did not stir
or whimper, I kept my mouth open.
I remained bruised for weeks.
When my face was almost pink again
He prompted me to clean the walls and floor
of my cell with my tongue. I licked
for hours, scraping up each wisp of skin and hair.
My throat became thick with cobwebs,
my mind clear as light.
4. Hunger Strikes Columba of Rieti (1467–1501)
My body is a temple I keep
clean for You, spotless –
lashing my skin so it grows
tired of bleeding.
Wearing hair shirts I cannot forget
what it means to be alert.
I have toured the Holy Land in visions.
I don’t imagine they would understand
what I see.
When they came for me, the men,
they ripped off my robes
expecting to find me virginal,
untouched.
How they gasped in horror!
How glad I was that I had used myself
like an old rag.
Beating myself with that spiked
chain shielded me,
my breasts and hips so deformed
they ran from me,
screaming.
5. Hunger Strikes Gemma Galgani (1878–1903)
Chapter 1: St. Gemma’s Birth and Early Education: First Flowers of Virtue. Her Mother’s Death
Chapter 2: St. Gemma’s life at Home. Her Heroic Patience in Great Trials
Chapter 3: St. Gemma’s Dangerous Illness and Miraculous Recovery
Chapter 4: St. Gemma Tries to Enter Religion. She is Not Received
Chapter 5: St. Gemma Receives the Stigmata
Chapter 6: St. Gemma Meets the Passionist Fathers. More About the Stigmata
Chapter 7: St. Gemma’s Characteristic Virtue
Chapter 8: The Means by Which St. Gemma Attained Perfection. First, her Detachment
Chapter 9: St. Gemma’s Perfect Obedience
Chapter 10: St. Gemma’s Profound Humility
Chapter 11: St. Gemma’s Heroic Mortification
Chapter 12: Attacks by the Devil1
Chapter 13: St. Gemma’s Gift is Raised on the Wings of Contemplation to the Highest Degree of Divine Love2
Chapter 14: St. Gemma’s Last Sickness3
Chapter 15: St. Gemma’s Death and Burial4
She punches her stomach loose, blind-
naked like a baby mole.
In the shower she cannot wash herself clean
the way she’d like. Rid herself
of useless molecules. Would that she
could strip her bones,
be something
neat,
complete.
Useful.
To eat or not to eat,
switch table sides.
Stuff cheese sandwiches
and chocolate blocks into a wide
moist orifice. Or, alternatively
zip that mouth
closed like a jacket,
a body already
contained within.
It doesn’t need
to feed.
But I have set a table for us all.
For us all, a feast!
On a vast, smooth cloth, already soiled.
Let’s take a seat, eat our fill.
You know you want to,
dig in.
I’ve never thought about the moon so much,
considered it sister-like, watching us learn
how to be together. You in my arms, perfect
circle of your small mouth pressed to my breast.
Lunar light from my phone, my own brain, the moon
all shining. It’s scary how big the night is, how small
we are in it. Think of the others up with us,
a night-nation of milk and mouths, all fumbling
towards each other in the dark, singing.
The shape of you, a crescent against me. Little planet
exploring your phases. Oh, moon be good to her
in the ebb-and-flow of monthly life. Lick the path clean.
But for now sweet Nightbaby, rock with me.
*
VICTORIA KENNEFICK is a poet, writer and teacher from Shanagarry, Co. Cork now based in Co. Kerry. She holds a doctorate in English from University College Cork and studied at Emory University and Georgia College and State University as part of a Fulbright Scholarship. Her research on the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and Frank O’Connor was also funded by an IRCHSS Scholarship and a MARBL Fellowship. Her pamphlet, White Whale (Southword Editions, 2015), won the Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition and the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry News, Prelude, Copper Nickel, The Irish Times, Ambit, bath magg, Banshee, Southword, Bare Fiction and elsewhere. She won the 2013 Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize and many of her poems have also been anthologised and broadcast on national radio stations. A recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, she has received bursaries from Kerry County Council and Words Ireland. She was a co-host of the Unlaunched Books Podcast and is on the committee of Listowel Writers’ Week, Ireland’s longest-running literary festival. Her first book is due from Carcanet in 2021.
Acknowledgements –
The Poetry Review
The Stinging Fly
Still in the Dreaming Anthology
Ambit
Bare Fiction
Southword
Poetry Day Ireland Poem 2020
___________________
1 All night I dream of food, Jesus take my taste from me. Rip out my tongue and I will expiate, through my bleeding for you, all the sins committed by your shrouded men.
2 For sixty days I vomited whenever I ate.
3 I was tormented by banquets.
4 Am I threatened by flesh or its opposite?