You will be believed
If you are a nice girl who approaches the authorities without hesitation. If you hold
out your hands in supplication. If you say Please. If you do not ask for too much. We
are not made of money. Be careful of the money, Do Not Disturb.
If you did not survive. She fought so hard/ what an inspiration/ what a sad story/ what
a good girl. If you did not survive with compliance, fawning, and forgetting. If you
died. Who could have lived with that? If we do not have to deal with the aftermath. If
the mess is tragic but contained.
You will be believed if you apologise. If you are not angry. Who can believe
something so large, so spiky, so purple and black?
If you reported everything immediately. If you did not travel via a safe country. You
will be believed if you are not here and you do not speak. If there is no delay, no time
for petals to turn brown and rot away, for new closed nubs to grow. No time for a
splinter, forgotten but occasionally felt, to make its way to the surface.
If you do not swear. If you do not cry too much. Some people are so dramatic. They
are all like that. You get used to it. If you cry. Lack of emotion is suspicious. What are
you, a rag doll/ an empty vessel/ a story told until it is empty?
If you do not have any gaps in memory. If unremembered elements do not ambush
you in the night. If your memory is not like eggs, scrambled by somebody hungry and
careless. If you do not stop mid-sentence, suddenly blank as a snow field. We know
sometimes nature muffles and blankets, but I’m afraid, soon, our footprints will be
everywhere.
God tries to explain to me
I so loved the world I spat in it.
I divided it into multiplying
versions of itself, all of them colliding,
world crashing into world.
I created all these pieces and wholes
and now who can tell which is the whole and which the part?
Everything is broken and mended
broken and mended, broken.
I escaped from all the churning,
so as not to be crushed,
but I am always still here.
I gave you these plastic dolls that can cry,
(like a person, a real person)
and technology accelerating so fast
you humans might even realise what you are capable of.
(All the pieces are there, all the beautiful and ugly pieces.)
I gave you people who look like other people,
there are so many people now
some of them have to look the same.
Like that time you saw your sister in the café
but she was on the other side of the world,
it was just another human buying a drink
with almost the same face.
I gave you branches which I held upside down
and dipped into barrels of light.
I was delicate, only touching the edge of each leaf—
did it make you sigh or did you fail to notice?
I gave you a moment of spotting a thinning patch
on the top of his head,
one you know he’s not aware of.
He’s bombastic, overconfident,
but you saw the lightbulb shine on skin
hidden from him.
I gave you people preaching, screeching,
Lock them in a room/ a country/ a place that never existed
and somewhere below the noise,
if you push gently through
the trailing threads of linked lives,
I gave you a quiet thrum heard
all the way to the bottom of the nearest body of water
(even if it’s just the bath you ran earlier,
because you’re tired, because you don’t want to think anymore.)
When I said I spat, it was rich moisture, it was love,
and what I really want is for you to disappear into it.
Make it an effortless vanishing,
like settling into those grooves in your sofa,
one for each leg.
_______________
Caroline Stancer was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition in 2021, commended in Verve Festival’s competition in 2023, and shortlisted for Primers 2023, she has been widely published in magazines. She is studying for a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University and recently completed a novel. Caroline co-runs the poetry collective and podcast, Dandelions Poetry.
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