Francesca McMahon
Lessons in Life
Sometimes he screens
the short furtive film of reproduction
– from frogs, to rabbits, to humans –
where sex is shown as silent,
necessary, completely without joy.
Sometimes I recite
the many diseases
of the vitamin deficient
(rickets, scurvy, beriberi)
and he tells me the list
holds cadences as subtle
as the Shipping Forecast
and my ears are cut from cloth.
Sometimes an hour turns
and (again) I learn nothing.
Today I am busy cutting
my initials into the soft
brown wood of the lab bench
with a redundant ballpoint,
when he says, “Everything
is discovered in biology”.
And I decide to pay attention.
He promises to produce drama;
the soap opera of genetics.
I watch as he outlines,
in a white chalk diagram,
the sheer impossibility
of two blue eyed people creating...
a brown eyed child.
Silent disbelief.
The knowledge coming
slowly as though by osmosis.
The beauty of its symmetry.
The splintering of identity, of family.
Nature’s own truth.
He says, “Everything is discovered in biology”. Then wipes
the board, and sends me – an orphan – to the fridge to fetch the box
of skinned pigs’ knees and the brown marble of a rat’s heart. Oblivious.
Page(s) 39
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The