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Abigail Mozley

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Aquaerobics - Alpha Females

Oh look at us old girls dancing
slow as goldfish in the pool.
Our best and only antique flesh
is chromed with air bubbles and dressed
in silver and the snailtracks
of the rivulets of time
and gravity and light
reflected and refracted through
this glassy element we struggle gamely in.

Oh yes, our flesh is freckled
with death so long we’ve been
under the sun and the water
makes us childish and noisy
and silly as seahorses as we play
with pink and orange plastic
toys and dumb-bells;
armbands on feet for exercise
against eureka gravity
in time to old pop songs as tender
black and blue as bruises.

Are we dancing to rewind
or unspool time? To windlass
in the watered silk of fallen flesh?
To reupholster our old bones
in the lost satin and brocade of oestrogens?
Or is this just some kind of ageing joke
against the gimcrack backdrop of shipwreck,
some architect’s idea of leisure
centre fun, forgetting death, and drowning?

You have to laugh,
we have to dance,
us game old girls
grooming ourselves for widows’ cruises,
death or boredom. No, no, no,
we dance because our dancing turns
the blue globe underneath our knotted toes
and the cloud blown sky depends upon
our silver streaming shoulders.

 


Abigail Mozley is a body-building grandmother and cruising widow. She is emphatic on the subject of Alpha Females - the post menopausal women who are the new sex, the new super-eunuchs - freed from all that oestrogen - as irresponsible as dandies but with far more gravitas.

 

Page(s) 12-14

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