Poetry

FOUR POEMS

by Dzifa Benson

Miss Hopwood works hard for her money
seven shows a day and six days a week

Wrists where my elbows should be, I’ll still always
wear my wedding ring. You stare at me as if this
embarrassment of limbs protruding from my chest
is an act of war waged against you. I know what I am,
a wound, God in the shape of a grand jest, the writhing
of chimaeras in hurricanes. My depleted spirit is
surely not the most hospitable of hosts, cobbled
together in foundling hospitals, taverns and fairgrounds,
in excess, you say, of the natural order of things. You
can’t imagine what I choose to believe in this armour,
this memento mori standing before you like the stinking
yeast of your yet to be lived indignities. I remember now,
my entry into the world sucked all the air out of the room
when the royal midwives lifted me clean from the womb.

♀

Miss Pindar is a doppelgänger for the living wonder
of the deep sea roots lurking in all our family trees

What a rare bonanza I am for a nation of starers!
Double-shaped and female to my navel, out of the waters
of Fiji and walking on land like a many storied queen
of the sea, I dare you to reproduce the equal of my iridescent
tail in all its finery. The veracity of my existence may be eternally
contested but seeing is surely believing and nature has nurtured
no other kink like me, a goddess as irresistible as Charybdis’
tidal allure, Venus before the yawning of her shell. Unlike
those other animals who eye you sideways, their gazes
flickering and passing on, don’t expect me to peer coyly
back at you through my webbed fingers or conceal what
passes for a vulva with a fig leaf. My curly, long green hair
so artfully placed across my breasts stages your curiosity
and long may that be my only concession to modesty.

♀

Miss Crackham would rather quaff a quart of
beer than listen to a tedious sermon in church

From the O’s of your slack jawed gawks, I’d wager
you’re flabbergasted by this glory of corpulence.
Your rapt attention is almost more than my skin
can hold as I sit on a two foot high stage in this bedlam
of necromancers, knife-swallowers and monster
mongers but I’m no performing monkey. When I aged
out of being the Largest Child in the Kingdom, I had
to live like an outcast but that’s not a tale for this day’s
display of fat. In the meantime, I’ve learned how to model
my skin from the outside in, how to constitute this flesh
in the act of posing all its rolls, its flab and its folds
for the merriment of you, the audience, that fickle beast
who always rolls over to let me tickle its greedy belly
as it buries its head in my bosom’s bounteous valley.

♀

Miss Van Dyk, the tall Dutchwoman, thinks of her
face as an unexplored, difficult to ascend place

I cannot stand silence so it’s the din of the stage
for me where I can sway among the rafters to the spiel
of the barker and stalk the boards to the rasp of hurdy-gurdy
and gauge of long drum. It’s true, I have stumbled and fallen
many times but I am also a spiritual sister of giraffe-necked
women, those daughters of stilt-walking Titans. You all want
too much for your shillings but I bear this greatness
which has been thrust upon me on a graceful scaffold
you all want to scale. Home is sawdust and greasepaint
kin is the spit-snarl of the rabble, half-cut with pale ale.
In my dreams, I always dance a minuet with someone
tall enough to make my audacious proportions feel
petite and delicate without having to bend and stoop
even as the plume on my hat, once so tall, now droops.

♀

Miss Morgan, the Windsor Fairy, excited in the
breasts of dukes sensations of dazzled rapture

When it’s a big world and you’re a little person like me
even walking can seem uncanny when you are simulacrum
of woman, homunculus or Lilliputian, as if something
has been left missing from the making of you - if that’s
what you choose to believe for your own edification.
Yes, it may be true that it’s a strange tongue this one
my body is forced to speak but when you’ve been used
to belly-boxing at the bottom of a wagon for the better
part of your existence, blood can be flowers or midnight
or lightning or courage or the very last thing you see.
Make no mistake, I’m no small winner. I know that by
the authority afforded to me by royal decree. So don’t
assume the diminutive proportions of my anatomy hide
any inclination towards the smallness of a life.

♀

Miss Sidonia, married twice then retired
a very wealthy woman who lived a long life

When Nicu was twelve days old God sent me
the downy fuzz that sprouted into this chestnut-
coloured beard. I will not take it off! How else
would you, the hoi polloi clock me? Not quite
wolf, this capricious fork in the course of evolution
is a church of marvels, an edifice fashioned for
your insistent titillation that has made me rich.
So if this visage is to be my inheritance, let it be
a diamond in the sty, a lure to hook into the lip
of the mob. This hirsute stunner means I cheated
death, I fought and won. I am a sight to silence
the baying crowd and I believe in beating my own
gong. That makes me beautiful and owing no favours.
I bow now to the deities who gambol in my whiskers.

♀

Miss Devono’s blue eyes and silver hair made men
weak at the knees with a common unscientific fervour

How easy it is to construct a living wonder when you can trip
from awe to ridicule and back to awe again on a tight rope
of paradox worthy of the steeliest wire walkers. I wash my hair
in beer to achieve the desired look of perfect imperfection
that frames my face in this frizzy halo of hair that you say
makes me look just like an angel. Zeleah, Zuruby, Zula
or Zobedia - no matter what exotic name you demand of me,
eventually you will turn me out of this stall, out of this roving life
just easily as you turned out the learned horse and dancing bear.
Sometimes, I wish this burden of blood and bone would leave
my body as easily as piss. Because you still want to subdue
my flesh in this conjurors carnival of Circassian glamour
I know to live free I must always refuse to look in the mirror.

♀

Miss Vaughn threatened legal action against any
other act daring to say they were uglier than herself

When you think of a daughter, I bet you never imagine
this hacked gristle for a face and this epidermis, a hot
to the touch patchwork of failed answers lumping human,
animal and vegetable together. Or my voice, dragging its
woe from the shadows of sideshows. You think rouge and lipstick
are as out of place on my face as lace curtains on a schooner’s
portholes, grotesque hag, mirror for an ugly soul. Myth
is the gaping maw into which you wedge my jutting jaw, you
are the mooncalf who comes and goes, comes and goes
but if I am something so monstrous what is your reason?
My mother marked me well so that I would know myself
again in other lives after the fifth, sixth and tenth times.
In all the ways to look what you see is your shame, not mine.

♀

Miss Baartman wears her sense of self tightly at a
night suitable for ladies, she musn’t let it float free.

Here I am ripe and raw, stumble-root carved as woman
untethered from my shadow and living in its shade.
Pinched, poked and prodded with parasols by things
that should never have been born, pretty things, other
things of fashion accompanied by their young black pages,
caricatures in this parliament of monster makers. Tired
of being tired, I hang like a curtain skirting the stage,
my cloth pouring down endlessly as you watchers waft
right through the cloth of me, convinced by your own sneers.
Where in this affair is the true monstrosity if you can laugh
and name and point and you look but you do not see
the gluttonous black craters where your hearts should be?
Khoekhoe tamab, Sab ke - you are all so uncouth
so please remove my name from your mouths.

♀