Phoebe Nicholson - You Tell Me Stories
by and published in Edition Twelve of Pomegranate
Told me this is how summer gets in –
through the threads of my dresses and
threads of spit and story between us.
He tells me winter will leave through the window,
if you’d notice,
and skid off my bare arms.
How it will not even snarl in the telephone cord
or trip on the window-slits, the
light-pits, the gentle clip of morning.
He tells me, you tell me, the moon loosens
and the flowers squint, and that is why
we must sleep too.
Or the big planet will fall out of the sky
and chaos in the sunfire,
but you will whittle your fingertips
and tell me about a bookshop you found –
a vanish.
A clutch of lovely together, lovely.
I gave you back comfort, you gave me back
stories as trinkets and odd coins
which we will swap in our pockets
and swap fingers and make everyone sick,
happily.
It’s a start, hermit-crab hearts, peeping
shy wool, shy eyelashes skittering a delicate instrument,
haywire diagrams and illustrations
for your stories of small-fry uniforms,
and the same haircut since you were six,
cassette tapes, basements.
To think how perfect, how simple and clear.
To think how you fell over when you were small,
the flags at football games,
still the scarf pinched on your wall.
Kiss-brute, stolen in night-wax and fast faces,
supine, you, face full of secret benches and living rooms and spirits.
Me on my stomach, my back is like a desk.
Tell me stories and I will try so hard not to forget them
and feed you black tea
because that is all I have.
My teachers are getting married.
My sister is married to her puppets
and my mother is dying.
My brother clogged in his room in sordid soundplugs,
all wrong, wrong.
So there is only you to teach me
and you teach me in your sleep.
I have seen how close I can get to your pupils. They are gaps,
passages, tunnels I can find where you keep
your stories.
Unless they are in bones and shadows.
Unless you stash them in between freckles,
or boil them in your blood.
You should know though,
I give up on my peace and past, and I
hold onto yours like a cat-caught, hot-weight.
And you should know, there are people sitting near us
who thieve your stories into their hard skulls
and will simply empty them out
at boring parties.
And they will never know how I fumbled for them forever in the
tumble-ache evenings. How
they smell like sea in the mornings.
Phoebe Nicholson
Phoebe Nicholson is 19 years old, and grew up in a profoundly obscure village in Devon. She currently studies English at Oxford University, has had poems published in Ink Sweat & Tears Magazine, and the Nth Position and was a runner-up in The Ted Hughes Young Poets’ Award 2008. Besides poetry, she enjoys strange tea, collaging, and referring to herself in the third person.