Hera Lindsay Bird Read online

  Hera Lindsay Bird

  * * *

  HERA LINDSAY BIRD

  Contents

  WRITE A BOOK

  MIRROR TRAPS

  MONICA

  WAYS OF MAKING LOVE

  HAVING SEX IN A FIELD IN 2013

  IF YOU ARE AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PHARAOH

  HATE

  CHILDREN ARE THE ORGASM OF THE WORLD

  WILD GEESE BY MARY OLIVER BY HERA LINDSAY BIRD

  BISEXUALITY

  THE EX-GIRLFRIENDS ARE BACK FROM THE WILDERNESS

  PLANET OF THE APES

  LOST SCROLLS

  LOVE COMES BACK

  THE DAD JOKE IS OVER

  EVERYTHING IS WRONG

  DAYLIGHT SAVINGS

  HAVING ALREADY WALKED OUT ON EVERYONE I EVER SAID I LOVED

  KEATS IS DEAD SO FUCK ME FROM BEHIND

  NEW THINGS

  PAIN IMPERATIVES

  FOLLOW PENGUIN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hera Lindsay Bird has a MA in poetry from Victoria University of Wellington, where she won the 2011 Adam Prize. Her work has been published by The Toast, The Hairpin, Sport, Hue & Cry, The Spinoff, The New Zealand Listener and Best New Zealand Poems. In 2017 she won the Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry and the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize. Hera Lindsay Bird is her first collection; a Laureate’s Choice poetry pamphlet, selected by Carol Ann Duffy and titled Pamper Me to Hell & Back, will be published by smith|doorstop in early 2018. She currently lives in Wellington.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HERA LINDSAY BIRD

  ‘By turns bleakly hilarious and peppered with pitch-perfect similes … [Hera Lindsay Bird] has made me, like many others, more excited about poetry than I have been in a long time’

  Lucy Rhiannon Coslett, Guardian

  ‘On more than one occasion, while working through a poem, I have found myself asking, “what would Hera Lindsay Bird do?” There should be bumper stickers. Bird’s debut, the self-titled Hera Lindsay Bird is an exhilarating read, but what most enthrall me are her extravagant and cartoonish images … Bird is an enfant terrible’

  Lucy Tunstall, Poetry

  ‘Much has been made of the sexual nature of her writing, but really, Bird’s tendency to feed the reader mildly pornographic images … is the least interesting thing about her. Her sexual references are often sly jokes, the punchlines delivering a sharp jolt that opens you up for lovelier lines that lie scattered all around. It’s a cunning trick, giving the illusion of reckless intimacy, as if the reader’s being dragged into the poet’s very bedroom. But really, Bird is nowhere near the bed. She’s over at her desk, scribbling furiously, thinking hard, quite possibly laughing to herself. Or maybe she’s out in the sitting room, watching sitcom reruns and shouting at her telly … Bird bangs vivid images against one another and jump-cuts from the intensely intimate to the casually conversational … she is perhaps our own fledgling Frank [O’Hara]: loose and sloppy and spirited and sincere, a gifted show-off who’s plugged into the life-giving voltage of pop culture and blessed with a bloody good sense of humour’

  Grant Smithies, Sunday Star Times

  ‘[Bird] shows a rare, self-effacing self-reflexivity in an age of narcissism … this is a poet who is not just using language as a tool, but as an art form … The depths of the emotional space in this work – taken to the realms of the ridiculous – are extraordinary to fathom and relish as a reader’

  Kelly Malone, Cordite Poetry Review

  ‘Even in the most sombre poems, Bird’s language is surprising and delightful … [She] draws revelation from the mundane … there is a satisfying defiance in Hera Lindsay Bird, the poet positioning herself against conservatism and authority … Her work acknowledges that everything is absurd, the system is fucked, but we – indefatigable – will keep making art and we will do it how we want’

  Jessica Alice, Kill Your Darlings

  ‘Garrulous … impressive … Somewhere about halfway during my first reading, I found myself laughing until it hurt’

  Airini Beautrais, Listener

  for Angelo

  WRITE A BOOK

  To be fourteen, and wet yourself extravagantly

  At a supermarket checkout

  As urine cascades down your black lace stocking And onto the linoleum

  Is to comprehend what it means to be a poet

  To stand in the tepid under-halo

  Of your own self-making

  And want to die ....

  Far away, in a field of wild orchids

  Is a backwards sentimentality

  Like a Christmas card with the robins scratched out

  Well, it was Oscar Wilde who said sentimentality

  is ‘the desire to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it’

  Like ................. when I masturbate and think of nuns

  Yet never go to church at Christmas?

  Now I have a Masters degree in poetry and no longer wet myself

  But I still have to die in antiquated flowers

  Does this make me sentimental?

  Well, who’s to judge

  You can get away with anything in a poem

  As long as you say my tits in it

  But it’s a false courage to be so .......... modestly endowed

  And have nothing meaningful to say

  You might think this book is ironic

  But to me, it is deeply sentimental

  like ............ if you slit your wrists while winking—does that make it a joke?

  To be alive

  Is the greatest sentimentality there is

  And I live to be sentimental

  And I love to be alive

  Always weeping at the end of a movie

  Over the frosted carriages of yesteryear

  I wrote this book, and it is sentimental

  Because I don’t have a right-sized reaction to the world

  To write a book is not a right-sized reaction

  To put all your bad thoughts on paper

  And make someone else pay for them

  My friend says it’s bad poetry to write a book

  And I agree with her

  I agree with her ........................................ in principle

  But I wrote a book anyway

  And I named it after myself

  My name is Hera Lindsay Bird

  This book is called Hera Lindsay Bird

  I wrote it, and I mean at least 75% of it

  And if that’s not sentimental

  Well ......................................................

  One day I’m going to have to pay for it

  MIRROR TRAPS

  I want to lie naked &

  face down

  in the beige epicentre

  of my despair

  /

  against the fringed tessellations

  of an inner-city graveyard

  tombstones wilting in the heat

  like black candles

  I want to lie alone &

  trembling

  in my hot neural vacancy

  like a jet shadow

  across a distant field of corn

  emitting

  many slow blinks of the heart

  & never have a job

  I want to lie each night

  in the overlapping heat

  of your absence

  &

  shuck my heart

  into fresh transparencies

  of repentant love

  black pheromones pour out of your eyeholes

  mirrors curl in the sunlight

  you smile at me &

  cool beads float through my heart

  like the inner pellets

  of a frozen baby rattle


  &

  the overall ache

  of never having touched you

  wedged

  like a double-sided battle-axe

  in the cleft of an antique rocking chair

  still rocking

  with its slow elliptical

  murder force

  the soft black

  drumroll of your gaze

  breaks over me

  like a molten wave of snow

  & my heart

  blinks

  & flares

  like the yellow gills of a taxicab

  when you look at me

  with your soft austerity

  like baby epaulettes

  It’s bad poetry to have a body

  & want to touch you with it

  even worse ........................ to be allowed to

  as you stare at me

  across the silence

  of your rare anti-camouflage

  & tell me what it is you have wanted

  It’s bad poetry to have a body

  and a bad life too

  to get everything you wanted

  but still walk away

  for no other reason

  but ........... the unspecified wrongness of your blood

  & all you can do

  is lie face down on the carpet

  & wait for the heart to finish buffering

  it’s love that plummets you

  back down the elevator shaft

  & it’s love you go missing to

  buying candles from an inner-city megastore

  there is something wrong with you

  there is something wrong with you that is also wrong with me

  I want to lie very still

  in a discount facial peel

  cucumber slices

  floating on my eyelids

  like a double-salad monocle

  I want to stare out the window

  in a deep optic hunger

  until everything burns

  with the mohair of loneliness

  & never be touched

  I want to lie awake each night

  & be struck by

  oscillating waves of

  regret

  the heart like a cold sleigh drawn

  again & again

  through the dark avenues of spring

  always towards your silence

  MONICA

  Monica

  Monica

  Monica

  Monica

  Monica Geller off popular sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S

  Is one of the worst characters in the history of television

  She makes me want to wash my eyes with hand sanitiser

  She makes me want to stand in an abandoned Ukrainian parking lot

  And scream her name at a bunch of dead crows

  Nobody liked her, except for Chandler

  He married her, and that brings me to my second point

  What kind of a name for a show was F.R.I.E.N.D.S

  When two of them were related

  And the rest of them just fucked for ten seasons?

  Maybe their fucking was secondary to their friendship

  Or they all had enough emotional equilibrium

  To be able to maintain a constant state of mutual respect

  Despite the fucking

  Or conspicuous nonfucking

  That was occurring in their lives

  But I have to say

  It just doesn’t seem emotionally realistic

  Especially considering that

  They were not the most self-aware of people

  And to be able to maintain a friendship

  Through the various complications of heterosexual monogamy

  Is enormously difficult

  Especially when you take into consideration

  What cunts they all were

  I fell in love with a friend once

  And we liked to congratulate each other what good friends we were

  And how it was great that we could be such good friends, and still fuck

  Until we stopped fucking

  And then we weren’t such good friends anymore

  I had a dream the other night

  About this friend, and how we were walking

  Through sunlight, many years ago

  Dragged up from the vaults, like

  old military propaganda

  You know the kind; young women leaving a factory

  Arm in arm, while their fiancées

  Are being handsomely shot to death in Prague

  And even though this friend doesn’t love me anymore

  And I don’t love them

  At least, not in a romantic sense

  The memory of what it had been like not to want

  To strap concrete blocks to my head

  And drown myself in a public fountain rather than spend another day

  With them not talking to me

  Came back, and I remembered the world

  For a moment, as it had been

  When we had just met, and love seemed possible

  And neither of us resented the other one

  And it made me sad

  Not just because things ended badly

  But more broadly

  Because my sadness had less to do with the emotional specifics of that situation

  And more to do with the transitory nature of romantic love

  Which is becoming relevant to me once again

  Because I just met someone new

  And this dream reminded me

  That, although I believe that there are ways that love can endure

  It’s just that statistically, or

  Based on personal experience

  It’s unlikely that things are going to go well for long

  There is such a narrow window

  For happiness in this life

  And if the past is anything to go by

  Everything is about to go slowly but inevitably wrong

  In a non-confrontational but ultimately disappointing way

  Monica

  Monica

  Monica

  Monica

  Monica Geller from popular sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S

  Was the favourite character of the Uber driver

  Who drove me home the other day

  And is the main reason for this poem

  Because I remember thinking Monica???

  Maybe he doesn’t remember who she is

  Because when I asked him specifically

  Which character he liked best off F.R.I.E.N.D.S

  He said ‘the woman’

  And when I listed their names for him

  Phoebe, Rachel and Monica

  He said Monica

  But he said it with a kind of question mark at the end

  Like ............... Monica?

  Which led me to believe

  Either, he was ashamed of liking her

  Or he didn’t know who he was talking about

  And had got her confused with one of the other

  Less objectively terrible characters.

  I think the driver meant to say Phoebe

  Because Phoebe is everyone’s favourite

  She once stabbed a police officer

  She once gave birth to her brother’s triplets

  She doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks about her

  Monica gives a shit what what everyone thinks about her

  Monica’s parents didn’t treat her very well

  And that’s probably where a lot of her underlying insecurities come from

  That have since manifested themselves in controlling

  And manipulative behaviour

  It’s not that I think Monica is unredeemable

  I can recognise that her personality has been shaped

  By a desire to succeed

  And that even when she did succeed, it was never enough

  Particularly for her mother, who made her feel like her dreams were stupid

&n
bsp; And a waste of time

  And that kind of constant belittlement can do terrible things to a person

  So maybe, getting really upset when people don’t use coasters

  Is an understandable, or at least comparatively sane response

  To the psychic baggage

  Of your parents never having believed in you

  Often I look at the world

  And I am dumbfounded that anyone can function at all

  Given the kinds of violence that

  So many people have inherited from the past

  But that’s still no excuse to throw

  A dinner plate at your friends, during a quiet game of Pictionary

  And even if that was an isolated incident

  And she was able to move on from it

  It still doesn’t make me want to watch her on TV

  I am falling in love and I don’t know what to do about it

  Throw me in a haunted wheelbarrow and set me on fire

  And don’t even get me started on Ross

  WAYS OF MAKING LOVE

  After Bernadette Mayer

  Like a metal detector detecting another metal detector.