Two Poems By Bex Hainsworth
Mary Visits a Magdalene Laundry
July 22nd, 1963
Nuns rattle keys in locks with cloven hands, clop down
corridors, dark as wailing mouths. The long dormitories stink
of exorcism, of mould crusting like old blood, of smoke from
a bonfire of birth certificates. Teenagers curl around their shame,
disowned, disappeared, already apocrypha in family albums.
So many Marys. A stigmata of women gather in the cold yard,
their palms raw from scrubbing, and I cannot touch them.
Deep in the building’s grey belly, Eve’s daughters flinch
from the hissing of steam, resist the baptism of boiling water,
spread dripping shirts into crucifixes. I remember the whispering
of beasts, but this heat is not inferno, but purgatory. The bread
of their bodies is eating itself to the bone, and they will never
confess enough to satisfy their jailors. A grey girl lifts a hand
to the hollow of my face; somewhere, her baby is screaming.
Diary of Shem’s Wife
after Penelope Shuttle
Day Three: I think I see a white hand reaching out of the water. Japeth says it is a sunfish, but I swear there is the sudden, stinging flash of a ring.
Day Seven: The ark is already skinned with barnacles and the anemones bleed like stowaways.
Day Eight: When the arguments start, I sneak into the aviary. The coy hoots of potoos and long-eared owls are as soothing as silence.
Day Sixteen: I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to the smell of a thousand different types of shit. We wear rags over our mouths as we shovel a second menagerie overboard. So many bunches of droppings, bubbled and purpling, like Noah’s vineyard.
Day Twenty-two: I miss green. The treefrogs and the sloths and the parakeets won’t suffice.
Day Twenty-three: In the restless dark, I hold the crib of an armadillo, rock it in my arms like the sea. I think of the women and their children, cowering beneath the raised fist of a wave.
Day Twenty-eight: There is a world turning inside me. Shem says he will build me a city, I will be the mother of multitudes. I worry about a second flood.
Day Thirty-one: I believe I am having an existential crisis. My melancholy leads me to discuss philosophy with tortoises and orangutans. They believe the porcupine is a prophet.
Day Thirty-six: Seeds and bulbs rattle in their pots on our cabin windowsill. I long for coriander and wild garlic. I’ve been told not to plant, not yet. I dream of pomegranates.
Day Forty: We slide into the damp straw valley between wombats. He coos my name into our collarbones, and it sounds like a dove returning.
About the Author
Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Wales, The McNeese Review, Sonora Review, Nimrod, and The Rialto. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by The Black Cat Poetry Press.