Rachel Sills
Kitchen Couplets
pinked in by fowlers just plonked
in a vase anyhow
& over on a fly-leaf table of such
exquisite Morten-Harketry
there are peonies in a
state of droop
the buds represent of little mouths
unsullied by fists
or symbolise something more pouty
& raw can you feel
the closed cap of the cervix it is
like a soft light-switch
the upholstery reeks it’s embedded
with quaint dust
the kind of powdered discharge left
too long on the cushions
where Pipit sate in a ladder-back
chair at some remove
at the home birth group
I sat like a severe egg
li’l leekies consomméd in bulbous fired pots
painted with naïf onions
slightly masculate in their thrusting
leaf-stems against speckle
this beefy pottery rips me up guy
esp when windfalls are put in
So. There is “jam” on the tablecloth now-then
& it’s homemade with a jelly bag & all
there being more to these jelliform semi-fluids
than a long luteal phase
like pastry-making at the advanced end
dipping a finger in to taste
it wrinkles at the setting point – the colder
the saucer the more the sauce are
teabags, bletting & blessings on your house
I have that striped door curtain too.
Two fertile/febrile frond-heads
baked in a pie
over by the butcher’s block I am
cabbaging my emotions
& at the centre is the heart which is super
sweet if left intact or lacerated
she is like to pickle it overnight in vinegar
which turns the veins purple
the pinny wraps round in little ruffles
& opens like flowering
send me rice from Kenya please for my stock
cupboards, for the pretty burlap bags
a brilliant life wrapped & cling-filmed
I have onions for eyeballs
(o my vision sliced like boiled eggs
on the sprung mandoline).
Slip a liner beneath that pear. It will
bruise to a shine
I give beneath finger pressure & these
peas won’t shuck themselves
Rachel Sills is the author of two chapbooks,Two Hundred Houses (Knives Forks and Spoons Press) and Endless/Nameless, co-written with Richard Barrett (Red Ceilings Press). Recent work has appeared in Blackbox Manifold, Shearsman Magazine and Datableed. She is a co-organiser of the Manchester-based reading series, Peter Barlow's Cigarette.