Creative response - Maz Hedgehog
“I am really interested in the ways we talk about bodies, especially women's bodies. So I was especially drawn to poems like Ombre by John Siddique [within the Suitcase, ‘Hair’ anthology] because it is this really loving ode to black women's hair, as well as the poem Breaking Through Gravel by Elizabeth R Rimmer because it uses the muses as a way of talking about womanhood in general. I took these poems and sought to apply a black queer feminist spin to ideas about embodiment, sensuality and how we relate to each other.”
Muses
The muses have no children that they know of. To remain so alive to the world they must forget the pain, their doctors say. Morphine and scopolamine and a dozen hours later they are handed a stranger.
The stranger is handed to a nanny whose name the muse can never quite remember and goes back to standing very still whilst a man who says he loves her says she is a muse.
I was wrong. The muses do have children and they know their children. They stay alive to the world because they did not sleep through birth. They cradled their little stranger whilst a larger stranger closed over 7 layers of flesh that separated the muse from their greatest work.
Of course this is their greatest work. It is the only work worth noting. It is the work worth giving up being a muse for. The artist has moved on anyway. We have all moved on anyway
Kissing Crowns What is a church before a heathen? Personally I'd get fisted on an altar but this time my love and I require little for our sacrilege only a clipper compulsion and a refusal to worship and guts to cut away a crown I have no desire to honour. How ugly I look like this! How unlike a goddess or the cradle of life because if a woman's hair is her crown well I have never been much good at woman and besides crowns are for kings and their queens which I know belong six feet under my heel feeding the maggots which feed the soil which feed the peach I eat laying next to my love with juice glistening on my chin with my juice glistening on their chin. This is the only self that matters. I clung to the tresses like I clung to men who felt clammy against my skin whilst plunging too gentle hands into hair that lies soft and strong as silk under foot shod in microfiber slippers bought last winter which I change for heavy stiff leather that leads me away with wind slipping across my scalp profane as a joint in a graveyard as witchcraft before a tabernacle as my lover kissing me beneath a monument to a queen I choose to forget.
Save Yourself Their faces move without moving A snigger I don't hear until three Night terrors later I listen closer now Pause my breath to listen Watch the faces unmove Pick apart my terrors for clues It has saved my life It hasn't saved me
The Bitch Knows
Of the bitches that howl and bite she is not the favourite. She is one of many, so many that skipped past civilization and slipped headlong through its cracks. She does not know the many. They left her to scavenge amongst the ruins. The ruins rebuilt from glass, convex and concave to the point of delirium. No it is built from sandstone, solid and unmoving to the point of rigor mortis. No it is built from both: the judgement of stone and the duplicity of glass, the ruins have had new life breathed into them. The breath was stolen from the bitch’s grandmother's lungs. The bitch is breathless. She has skipped into a stream of consciousness, the end of days made heavy living flesh. The only name she knows for herself is bitch. The only word fit for polite society is bitch. It gestures vaguely towards maternity and matrimony and all the modern things the bitch bypassed on her way to rot sweet carrion. The bitch is a scavenger, ever hungry for couth and manners and etiquette she can spew into a riverbank. The bitch is hungry. She doesn't know what else to eat. The crows always get to the eyes and tongues first and she hears them pop and tear and the sounds smell like a 3rd missed supper. She is hungry for something better than putrid fat. She doesn't know what is better than putrid fat. The bitch howls at the moon, nostrils flared and eyes wild. She howls with a belly full of putrid fat. She howls silent as a still birth and remembers being born into a world that only ever named her bitch.
The bitch doesn't want to howl or bite. She watches from outside a chainlink fence. She watches what her betters make of an inarticulate quadruped. She bypasses prize oxen and pampered cats to focus on pedigree show dogs, on the thoroughbred race horses. She sees the show dog wheeze through a face too flat to breathe and horses run until their matchstick legs snap under weight of shining flanks but she also sees rosettes. The bitch wants a rosette. In search of a rosette the bitch learned tricks -- she can sit and stay and fetch and roll over. She can even play dead. She won't do the tricks. The bitch is better than cheap tricks. She does the tricks. She performs when the people with the rosettes promise her more than just a rosette. They promise her another name fit for polite society. She plays dead, even as she knows they are lying.
The bitch goes to work. She smiles at the woman whose memory she spewed into the riverbank this Friday last. She chose to forget the cost of couth. The bitch replaced the memory of how many teeth you must exchange for etiquette with the taste of rose and hemlock laced cookies. The woman -- lady, really. Lady is the only word that fits such pleasant pearls and silk -- the lady reaches out for the bitch's belly with a kind rub, a reward for good behaviour. She still uses a choke collar, the bitch is still set out in the cold, but she got the rosette. Written in the cheap gold centre is a new name, but the bitch cannot read so it doesn't much matter. Besides, the bitch knows better than to trust the careful hand or the cheap rosette so the bitch bites. Nips, really. The bitch lets the lady know that she understands her place and loathes it and needs it.
The bitch is in from the cold. Her throat is still sore. The rosette itches. She sits, arse on a seat made for bipeds and fork between forepaws as she listens carefully to talk of religion and politics. She has no religion but the first blood from a jugular. Politics seems to entail only who will pull the choke chain. She listens. This is civilization. This is how she earned her rosette and her seat and a night in the warm. She still cannot read the new name given her by polite society. It doesn't sound better than bitch when the lady and her peers say it. They all smile at her, friendly as foxgloves and wave their hands through the air and murmur things that both are and are not epithets. She remembers why her pack skipped past civilisation. She longs for the riverbank. She sits at the table and remembers the difference between a garnish and garbage. She eats both. They extend a soft, careful hand towards her. She responds as a bitch responds. She is back out in the cold.
The bitch howls at the first moon of the year. She runs through undergrowth, feral to the point of rabid. The bitch is going to die and live and die and live and fear the water and love the flora and froth and die and live again. She's learned a thing or two since biting the hand that refuses to feed. The bitch knows.