On Translating the Self
by and published in Edition Nine of Pomegranate
Fully preserved in a smooth-paged notebook that aspires to be a butterfly or an astronaut, your words struggle, then curdle and separate,
and, on trying too hard, on speaking for someone who isn’t you (or who you wish you were) the pen slips to the floor. For it is only when perfect squares divide themselves open to us, that, for a glass-clear moment we understand. You stand stock-still as brilliant light tips into your bedroom, and realise your lips are tilted as if to kiss the morning. The turn of a kaleidoscope in each rice grain of frost. For it is only on finding a tape you’d forgotten about, but played years ago, over and over, that the game of marbles on the carpet becomes a miniature universe, small planets rolling around beneath your fingers. And it is only when the smell of Grandpa’s fuchsias stifles you unaware – rain-flushed and fat – or your nose brushes against moss caked like clay on grit stone that you become intimately aware of your own familiar pain. The pen lies by the side of the sofa, and, when you wake, words you don’t remember writing surface like a bad translation. All that is left is: this this this … you know, that feeling.Sophie Clarke
Back in the glory days, Sophie was a commended Foyle poet of 2007. She has more recently dabbled in a spot of poetcasting, and is soon to appear in Popshot magazine. In general she is rather too fond of cardigans and Radiohead. Also Kinder Scout, antique furniture, haribos and Viktor Shklovsky. Most likely to be found in her little Durham home, writing an essay on the shoeness of shoes at two o’clock in the morning. Rumoured to be anorexic. Aspires to be Thom Yorke. Probably the most unprolific writer ever.