barbarajimenez

[salisburyhare]

INQUISITOR

Published in 'a fine line,' Winter 2021

For the love of God, stop screaming. 

I am sending you to Heaven. 

Through a cobweb of Italian rain, 

fine and white as lace, you will go unto the King 

in raiment of black and gold, ember and sizzling. 

You will be cleansed of sin and hair and flesh— 

you will be valley-bone dry, ligaments knitting 

like a cat’s cradle. In the sky-less Heaven 

you will praise my name. 

I do not need an explicable God. I only need a God 

who looks like you—bright vertical, 

fat-sparking saint, beard alight, a thousand hairs 

crawling, Heaven-bright, back to your skin. 

Tonight, blooded between my red sheets, 

I will still smell your oily residue 

and I will burn.   

[alessiathewriter]

My favourite place in Dublin ☘️📚 - - #longlibrary #dublin #holdlibrary #trinitycollege #ireland🍀 #ireland #irlanda #wheelchairgirl #wheelchairlife #wheelchairtravel #dontstopme #accessibletravel #irishgirl #friedreichsataxia #wheelchair #disabilità #disability #disabledandcute (presso Trinity College Library) https://www.instagram.com/p/BorF6oGHlYA/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1lizvqpciskm

[wandering-jana]

The Long Library at Trinity College in Dublin. #library #dublin #travel #history #architecture #architecturephotography #urbanexploration #ireland #trinitycollege #longlibrary #books

[joshmauser]

Trinity College #dublin #ireland #trinitycollege #thebookofkells #irishharp #library #longlibrary #trinitycollegelibrary (at Trinity College Library)

[astridimages]

The Long Library...a must see in Dublin #ireland #dublin #trinitycollege #longlibrary #holiday #ferien #reise #wanderlust #explore #photography #photography #portlandphotographer #pilot #captain #books #library #college #study #travel #lonelyplanet #throughmyeyessee

[mrpugtravels]

Mr. Pug visits the Book of Kells and the Long Library at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Now THAT is a library! #travel #mrpug #travelblog #travelgram #wanderlust #mrpugtravels #traveladdict #travelingram #explorer #wanderer #worldtravel #travellife #travelphotography #pugs #globetrotter #dublin #ireland #trinitycollege #trinitycollegedublin #longlibrary #librarylove #bookstagram #europeanvacation #irelandtravel #europetravel https://ift.tt/2EFOyUJ

[travelam]

The Long Library where they illegally shot some Star Wars scenes. #trinitycollegedublin #longlibrary #teampixel #bookofkells #hamiltonnotalexander #teamlambongireland #dublin

[salisburyhare]

TAXIDERMY FALKLAND ISLANDS WOLF IN THE ANIMAL ATTIC 

Published in Tarot #4

Charles Darwin stepped off the HMS Beagle 

and said you will soon go extinct, little wolf. 

You are too trusting  

and you have not learned how to be afraid. 

And you skink-plaited between his legs 

and ate from his evolutionist hands— 

licked at his scientist fingers. 

Learn from ours, said Darwin. Our wolves 

bristle like a thousand thousand razors 

in the shape of a predator. 

They know what to fear. Here 

you eat from the one hand while the other 

holds a knife. 

All the better to kill you with. 

Now glass where there should be eyes. 

Teeth with no bite. I want you 

to come back to life 

because I am alone too, and have also learned 

how to be afraid. I would never kill you. 

Come and sit on my lap, your warmth 

rising taxidermy dust around us 

like a cloud made of skin. 

Come and eat from my hand. 

[salisburyhare]

THE WIVES OF VATHEK

Published in Tarot, Dec 2021

Some nights we ran barefoot from our rooms 

like leopards made of flesh. Past the eunuchs, 

dreaming their beige dreams, 

then we raced through the palace of perfumes 

until we fell dizzy before burning censers, 

until we collapsed backwards over rosebushes, 

their thorns in our backs 

as though we lay over the celestial globe, 

studded stars pricking our skin. 

Now our husband has lost his mind. Now our husband 

looks like a far away man brought very close— 

the same blurred features, the same uncertain shape. 

We dream of him at the end of long corridors, 

running toward us. We dream of losing him in those corridors, 

doubling back until we are the chaser; we are the husband-king. 

He cries into us like handkerchiefs. 

He comes into us like handkerchiefs. 

But he does not throw us away. Maybe 

he loves us. 

Now nights are longer and smell of burning hair. 

Heads down like charging animals 

we race through the palace of the delight of the eyes, 

horrible nightgown-ghouls tearing up the dust, 

eyes squeezed closed. We contract and reform 

like a hive mind, 

as though our husband’s black dreams 

speak to us through the dark, 

forming us into murmurations. 

[salisburyhare]

SPIDER NIGHT

Published in Takahē 105

Dunedin glittering as a red-hot disco ball and your eyes like a predator sunset. That night, stuck to each other under floral sheets,

you slap an itch on your neck that by lamplight turns into a spider, the mysterious, bulbous contents of its abdomen smeared across your skin.

The air is as still as the Cold War, as two world leaders pretending not to eye each other as their hands hover over nuclear buttons.

I sweep up the streetlights like white-hot shards of glass – scatter them in the air over you, still spider-streaked.

The air becomes fractals, cool, and you are in glittering snow – it’s a white wedding, ours, and the priest in Christmastide vestments like a glowing monstrance.

The cathedral is made of sequins, every saint decked out in stalagmites and glowworms.

I think these things, you know. This is how I see you – wiping at your neck while behind you in the window the city stretches out like a cat made of jewels.

[salisburyhare]

ISCARIOT

Published in Starling Issue 11

I remember nights—the thirteen of us laid down, bruised with exhaustion. I turned to look at you, your eyes onyx half-spheres, like a camel’s viewed from the side.

You looked back, face taut. You’re thinking, you said. It’s loud. If you could have heard my thoughts, I would have known—known by the hitch in your face, your glance to the sky.

I am worse than you ever could have believed.

My story’s centre is the moment my lips touched your cheek. How far would you have let me go, for love? My hand on your face like raised scar tissue, my lips, my breath, your breath or just the wind.

My garden of paradise will be a marsh of blood, or mycelium erupting from the mouths of corpses. Every head will bear my face, every eye covered by a coin, every tongue will slur traitor, traitor.

I remember that night I wanted to ask you why you kept up the pretence that I could be salvaged. Instead I asked if you remembered your father’s house.

You searched my face in the same way you looked over crowds— like you were seeking a cripple, a sinner, someone to save. There are no doors, you said. No walls. No floors. It is not a house like we would know a house.

Your hand slid across the dust that separated us and I took it like a thief. Gripped it. Your nail pressed into my palm and above your head the stars looked like silver coins.

They would have found you anyway.

[salisburyhare]

GOD OF THE SEA

Longlisted in the Page & Blackmore Competition, 2021

“September 6th—We have seen the sea in its calmest and in its fury, and we must acknowledge the wonderful works of God, for what man can set a boundary to this expanse of water?”

Excerpt from the 1809 diary of John King, one of the first Christian missionaries to New Zealand.

You come from over the waters like a new and living promise. You are the word made flesh—you are the mouth made man. Gulls squall their rubbery language and the ocean glitters like rippling scales. You think back to being five, acting out Moses parting the waters to a cohort of ruddy relatives. Your mother, buckled and bristling in her new sage-green dress, pulling out a swathe of blue silk and billowing it in the air, letting it catch and bulge like liquid. This will do for the water, she had said. This will part nicely.

A silver fish flickers beneath the waves and you picture it multiplying, becoming a school, a bestiary—a moving feast. You will feed every strange mouth in this new land, you think—you will bring the words that will make them clean: Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 

This will do for his staff, said your Mother, and dislodged an axe from the shed. She put it into your hands and your memory is faulty, it was so long ago, but you swear the wood writhed, serpentine, between your palms.

On the tenth day at sea the cook dies and is given a water burial: we therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body. Your voice wraps around the deck like a thick black snake and the cook drops like a stone or a man in a noose. The sky overhead is blue and heavy with charging lightening, backlight-glowing. In your diary you have started counting the numbers of dead among the sheep and pigs. On the back page now you make a slow, black mark for the numbers of dead men. You could hope that the mark remains solitary. You could hope that no one else will die. You could.

You stay awake long after the others have retreated into the darkness below deck. You watch the sky shake out like shining foil, glittering like the sea if all the salt turned into light. If the cook is resurrected in his body you picture him shaking back to life like some pale deep-sea creature, blind-eyed and albino from the darkness, lungs full of salt so he glows from within.

On the twenty-seventh day a plague of locusts descends upon the ship. They are thick-bodied, thudding into the wooden mast like a head beaten again and again upon dry earth. A day of clouds and blackness, you think. There is a crack in the boards above you—you look up and the sky is bristling with bodies like shrunken angels. They are four-winged—shelled and skeletal, terrible with eyes. In the heat’s delirium you hear them saying in their voice of many voices a mighty army comes, such as never was in ancient times nor ever will be in ages to come. 

Someone brings a dead locust below deck and its iridescence seems to take light like a black nebula, like a hole or a pit in the sky. You hold out your hand for it. You are struck by the sickening thought that you could touch it to your lips like a burning ember, leave your mouth a nest of singing scabs, melodising repentance. The thought makes you laugh. The laugh makes you hurt.

These will do for the Egyptians, says the voice of your Mother, and in your mind she raises her arms to the sky as above her it blackens with thousands of shivering bodies.

Some weeks after this you cross the line of the equator, and one of the sailors dresses up as Old Neptune, the God of the sea. He glints in the sunlight, and in the years to come your memory will colour him in swathes of cardinal and purple, whirling around the passengers like a frenzied dervish. He laughs belly-deep and the long shadows of seabirds flicker his face in and out of sunlight.

The sailors he heals with his hands. The emigrants—dirty, weary, teeth aching—he christens with salt water. He glitters in the sun like Egyptian chariots swallowed by the Red Sea, still drifting in the black deep in all their finery, bejewelled and perfectly preserved. You wonder if their white eyes look up to the shapes of circling sharks and mistake them for descending angels. 

Later that night you stand in the darkness watching Saint Elmo’s Fire flicker in the sky above you. You are an educated man—you know that colour and glory are themselves children of science, which is a creation of God. You know something explicable happens in the air above; something measurable.

But still—you feel salt crusting dry on your forehead like a mirror of the stars overhead, and you think what man, small as a toy on black water and dwarfed infinitely, would not look to the cosmic brain above and forget where it ends and he begins? 

You are nearing the end of your journey. You know this means you are nearing the beginning of your journey. A great white cloud like a cotton curtain coils along the skin of the sea, Mount Egmont tipping above it like a crystalline promise. You are put in mind of speaking pillars, rippling columns, impossible vastness. From this cloud comes not a sublime voice, but the rubbery twanging of new birds: a Babel of their songs.

You are standing at the prow and you feel the insistent press of children at the backs of your knees as they flock to see their new land. You rest your hands on their heads and see again your mother, smiling down at you from her green height, a yellow bowl like a concave sun held between her hands.

This will do for God, she had said, balancing it on the windowsill where it pooled with sunlight like a bowl full of fire. 

[salisburyhare]

Audio & Interviews

Readings

"95 Million Years," 2023

"I Cope With Things Very Well (Which is a Lie)," 2022

Interviews & Conversations

In conversation with Louise Wallace and Erin Gourley for NZYWF 2022

[salisburyhare]

Publications

ODT, "95 Million Years," 2023

takahē 105, "Spider Night," 2022

Starling Issue 14, "I Cope With Things Very Well (Which is a Lie)"

Tarot #3 and Tarot #4

Mayhem issue 9, "Nobody," 2021

Landfall 242 and Landfall 243

a fine line, featured student poet, "Inquisitor," 2021

Published in 'The Cormorant' favourites anthology, 2021

a fine line, review of "I Am in Bed With You," 2022

Page & Blackmore, 3rd, "God of the Sea," 2021

Starling, Issue 11, "March Hare," "Iscariot"

My poetry reviews, Poetry Society

The Cormorant, Issue 3 "Eye Contact," 2019

[salisburyhare]

ENTRANCE

Authority Control:

#iknow10000things: asks & answers

#entrance: about this

#inventory: cool stuff and misc bits

#longlibrary: my poems, stories, writing, audio

#marblegallery: photos & ...other

#olroxsquarters: work stuff

#shanoasidequest: cats

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