Hannah Sullivan
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Hannah Sullivan
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From "You Very Young in New York"
Even the sting
when someone flinches at I love You
Is not unwelcome, like the ulcer on your tongue
...
The consciousness of the finite, the menaced, the essentially invented state twinkles ever, to my perception, in the thousand glassy eyes of these giants of the mere market.
...
4.3
Tears and liver spots on the back of the hand,
The comfort again and again of writing something fictional down.
All cancers were once benign,
Then the DNA forgets its prosody
And cells divide interminably:
The raddled beauty of doggerel.
Stained under a microscope,
An ovary is Venice at sunset,
Too beautiful to be painted said Monet.
Midas-touched sperm, bulging and fanning.
From "Repeat Until Time"
2.1
Days may be where we live, but mornings are eternity.
They wake us, and every day, waking is absurdity;
All the things you just did yesterday to do over again, eternally.
The clench of tonsil on extra tonsil is an oyster only once,
Once, the blood and itch of broken skin, and afterwards indifference,
The boredom of the weeping aromatic bedsores only once.
But, forever fumbling for the snooze button, the gym is there
Forever, and the teeth silt over yellow to be flossed, and there
Will be, in eternity, coffee to be brewed and that moment in the shower
When you open your mouth and rhotacise the water and just stand there,
Stupid bliss of hot water, tongue-tingling, steaming the shower.
...
True form is often seen only in retrospect, too late
...
True form is overlaid, like moss on broken tiles.
But scoured and weeded back, a mosaic face peers out and smiles.
...
Someone who has been abroad can never come home again
...
Children read the hours on dying flowers.
What will survive of us?
...
Short chains of carbon in the dust,
This is the practical answer.
Old laptops, pacemakers, leg pins.
DNA fibres revealing deaths cause.
Emails we sent and drafts we didnt send.
The things we said and those we shouldve.
From "The Sandpit After Rain"
Things happened in the wrong order, out of nature.
There was that larval froth in the morning in the garden, Bubbles of spit on the black rosemary sticks,
And in the afternoon the forelocks of a crocus.
At night I took long baths in the penumbra of the streetlight. And when we saw the foetus on the screen he did not dive,
He was no longer dangling on his cord,
His mouth was no longer snapping like Pac-Man's.
He had filled his womb. Only one baleful eye
Opened in the gloom, closed in the ebbing waters.
...
Late on summer Saturdays,
This is what the verger sweeps:
Ombre moons, pistachios, ash,
Hearts cut from upcycled maps,
Scalloped bits of Austen novels,
Hot pushed handfuls of white petals.
This is what the broom releases:
Acetate of Camel Lights,
Pheromones of human fear,
Public libraries' unwashed armpits,
Sweet sweat like a pound cake rising,
Modern roses' nothingness.
This is how things mix together,
Matter's endgame of fawn-dun,
The inevitable greyish
Persil makes its money from.
So when something singular
Comes along, it is a miracle:
Hail tap-dances down the tarmac,
Skittering in its silver shoes.
...
The huge relief of the sea as it reaches the beach
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