Jess-Cooke - Boom!

BOOM! For Melody, Phoenix, Summer and Willow BOOM! Carolyn Jess-Cooke Seren is the book imprint of Poetry Wales Press Ltd. 57 Nolton Street, Bridgend,Wales, CF31 3AE www.serenbooks.com facebook.com/SerenBooks Twitter: The right of Carolyn Jess-Cooke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. Carolyn Jess-Cooke 2014 Author Website: www.carolynjesscooke.com. ISBN: 978-1-78172-175-9 e-book: 978-1-78172-176-6 Kindle -978-1-78172-177-3 A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council. Cover Photograph by Brooke Shaden. Printed in Bembo by Bell & Bain Ltd. Glasgow. Nothing is lost, nothing created: everything is transformed. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry (1789) Boom! There was this baby who thought she was a hand grenade.

She appeared one day in the centre of our marriage or at least in the spot where all the elements of our union appeared to orbit and kept threatening to explode, emitting endless alarm-sounds that were difficult to decode. On the ridge of threat, we had two options. One was attempt to make it to the bottom of the crevice slowly, purposively, holding hands. The other was see how long we could stand there philosophizing that when she finally went off wed be able to take it. But then the baby who believed she was a hand grenade was joined in number: several more such devices entered our lives. We held on, expecting each day to be our last.

We did not let go. As you might expect, she blew us to smithereens. We survived, but in a different state: you became organized, I discovered patience, shrapnel soldered the parts of us that hadnt quite fit together before. Sometimes when I speak its your words that come out of my mouth. I Phone You From the Sumo I had a seat close enough to see the buttocks of the largest wrestler wearing a blue mawashi and the waterfall of flab all down his body and it must have been right as he craned his leg with the ease of a ballerina to ear-height that I felt alone in a stadium of five hundred in a city of forty million. I watched as time froze, as the scattered salt floated above the dohyou, as one by one the spectators blinked into nothingness and the streets emptied until I was the only girl in Tokyo.

On the line, an echo meant that we talked over each other, the freshness of our relationship palpable in those awkward, tentative questions. How are you?Whats the weather like? Does anyone speak English? I had no idea that six months from then wed conceive a child, that wed already be married and the whole fragile dust matter of love would grow bones, teeth, a pulse, an opinion. Neither distraction nor distance nor curiosity filled your absence. Imperceptibly, and without any ado, this whole wide world had changed its orbit to turn around you. Anonymous On the monitor a sea at night. Silver-edged squalls toss, argue.

My bladder a white hull seen from underwater. The sac a lifeboat, waves agitating at its sides. A tiny survivor huddles there, hazelnut of rounded shoulders and curled up legs (too early for knees, she says). Eight weeks and four days. The heart insisting, insisting, candlelight shivering on the far shore. The Days of the Ninth Month for Olivia Chapman They are not days, they are cenotes riven in eternity, raindrop by raindrop, wet troughs plunging gravity, bending physics month of centuries, month of drowning in my own flesh, month of Joshuas stopped sun around my waist. Her due date sat fixed on my Sainsburys calendar, I crawled through the squares of it, beneath the photograph of quinoa and pancetta salad, hefted my body through awful nights of pancaked lungs, acidic gullet, punched sinus, the crushed, corked pelvis, and when someone inevitably chirped not long now! Thats flown by! when the teasing strands of yet another dawn fingered through my curtains how can I tell of the courage it took to rut the fattened mole of myself again and again in black soil, among root-tendrils, riverbeds, bones, blunt arrow-heads, history of war, to burrow through the months clotted walls as though I had to sow and aerate the day of her birth in times soil like something that had never before existed? *Cenotes are natural sinkholes in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, products of the collapse of limestone bedrock.

Home Birth They said she was stuck, as though she was a nine-pound human fork pronged in the dishwasher, an umbrella that wouldnt fold to size. Stuck because my body had never given birth so I pushed until I thought Id turn inside out and yet she sat in my cervix for hours, heartbeat like a drum as the contractions collapsed on me like skyscrapers, as they talked about the knife. Second time round, the sour sensation of complete idiocy for willing this pain again, going through it, risking so much for someone who remained at the fringes of knowing, ghosted by awful wisdom that birth isnt the end of it, nor the worst episiotomy; infections; afterpains; breastfeeding. But my body remembered, it took the first shunt of his head, yawned, then toboganned him out in a gush of brine, red as a crab. I remember his arms like a sock full of eggs, muscular, fists bunched, as though hed been prepared to fight. The Right Ones The child is laid creaturely in the clear basket, human ruby, surrendered arms.

The not-yet-eyes. The antenatal group laid out what comes next: a maternal bond ensures you will recognisethe parent in your own skin. Follow your instincts! You wait. Another certainty arrives in lieu the right ones will come and claim this foreign jewel someone entrusted to you. The Waking Those first few days every part of her wakened, the seedling eyes stirred by sunlight, tight fists clamped to her chest like a medieval knight and slowly loosening, as if the metal hands were reminded of their likeness to petals by the flowing hours. Her colours, too, rose up like disturbed oils in a lake, pooling through the birth-tinge into human shades, her ink eyes lightening to an ancestral blue.

The scurf and residue of me on her scalp floated easily as a pollen from the sweet grass of her hair. She reminded me of a fern, each morning more unfurled, the frond-limbs edging away from her heart, the wide leaves of her face spread to catch my gaze. Once, I saw the white down of her skin cloud in my hands, the cream ridges of her nails drift like crescent moons, the thick blue rope she had used to descend me tossed like a stone, as though she was finally free. The Lotteries The nature of luck changes, too. In the two-week window between ovulation and a test that will say no when the body holds its yes in secret you read books, pamphlets, websites that bring to light that the odds of conceiving on the first try are up there with being swallowed whole by a shark or kidnapped by terrorists, that each month yields a two-day chance and even then, it may take a solid year of trying, and when the small white square shores up a second line luck is against you, with one in four of every such lines ending in miscarriage, particularly during weeks five and seven which is when you barely move or sleep, and when the nausea hits more violent than any other, toes to scalp someone mentions that this is lucky. In the widening span of nine months, more luck unfurls lucky that the day-and-night sickness lasts only three months.

Lucky that the first scan shows a heartbeat, the second, health, lucky that the withering anaemia subsides with pills (and the constipation isnt chronic), lucky that the pelvic condition isnt eclampsia, lucky that this is your first baby and so you can rest, lucky to live in a first world country, blessed by the NHS. And when thousands of such mines are dodged you are lucky to survive the birth. Many have not. You are lucky that the child survives, and when the bleeding wont stop you are lucky, again, incalculably lucky, and you return home, under the gold light of luck, cornucopia of blessings: clean water, a cot, infant-friendly bedding, and when you are not lucky with breastfeeding not such a simple act of nature, it turns out you are lucky that the baby takes to the bottle easily, you are lucky when she sleeps four hours straight, you are lucky that Tesco delivers, you are lucky when toast can be eaten before it is stone cold, you are lucky to have a shower before 3 pm, you are lucky that maternity leave is four weeks at full pay, you are lucky when the stitches heal, the bleeding slows, you are lucky to find her each morning still alive, pierced by the knowledge that somewhere out there, some other child has not woken and so the world goes on opening its many bright hands of luck and when you say