Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

She is lying on her back, head
propped up on a pillow of wood.
She is naked, William Clift
makes a sketch for his notebook.
One eye on posterity, he faithfully
draws her naked breasts, the tilt
of her chin, the way her hair
curls around the wooden block.
We see that her eyes, nose
and lips are puffy and shadowed.
We see there are rope burns
around her neck.

I am looking for her, here among the dust
and faded pages. First, they bring
the hangman's book, it's heavy,
so heavy I need a trolley to take it
from the library counter to my desk
and then I still need help to get
it out of its buff box. Its spine
is predictably crumbly. Inside
I find her details in columns, neatly
written; her name, Catherine Welch,
and beside it - Murder and Guilty
and then in the column headed 'remarks',
nothing.

Mr. Clift of the Royal College of Surgeons
tells us, 'This is the face of a murderer,'
and as we all know, hanging's
not good enough; no-one could eat
her sins, no-one could be that bulgy-eyed.
He has mastered the 'necessary inhumanity'
for the job. His notebooks will outlast
him. This is the theatre and we
are here to watch and learn.

The operating table is wooden
with a channel carved in to allow blood
to drip into a bucket of sawdust below.
A wax woman with only half
a face but a whole perfect tear
is on the shelf above, beside
ivory figures with hinged bellies
that can reveal their innards
to those allowed to touch and nearby
a cast, naked of skin and fat
sits beneath a sign saying
'know thyself'. It's April
and warm. The anatomist
must work quickly, she may putrefy fast.

She is twenty four, she is staying
at Fulham workhouse. Surgeon Holmes visits,
he testifies "The first thing I asked was
if she had been suckling a child lately;
she said she had not for two months."
He asks to see her breasts, she shows him
them. "I pressed on both her breasts
and milk spurted out ... she said, she kept
her milk a month after her child died
in hopes that she might get a situation
as wet-nurse; I then asked when her child died,
she said two months ago, aged two weeks."

I can't believe she let him!
Why didn't she squirt
it in his face, shout
"damn your eyes!" like Mary
Cut-and-come-again,
before she spat in the judge's
seat and kicked the prosecutor.

He peels her like an orange
fast and furious through the skin,
then cautious, to the pith, with simple
tools, right to the pulp.

"Did I tell you I took the child to be buried?"
"I never came that road; I never came past
his house that day, nor that night"

Forensic experts, (well, our Surgeon
Holmes) say that the child found
in the ditch had been a month
to six weeks old and dead
no more than a day. "His eyes
were a good deal suffused with blood,
as if they had been very forcibly
pressed; in fact the eye-balls
were both destroyed; I cannot imagine
how that could be done unless by the pressure
of the hand or fingers - there were no
other marks of violence about the child.

Did she do it?
There's a tree outside the library
its branches have been clipped
right back, stripping it
so naked that it cowers
and shrinks under the cold sky.

Her musculature is of interest
although not unusual in female convicts,
crawlers and pavement folk.
Hard hams which fade to string
bordering waste, muscles that have shrunk
to the size of the toys above his head.

She was seen by James Wright and Caleb
Stacey carrying a bundle that looked
like a baby near the ditch,
and later by a policeman "Looking
very minutely into the water...
I asked her if she had lost anything."
She'd called her son Johnny.

Did I not say it was born in Chick Lane,
Saffron Hill?"
"I never went through the place at all
till the Sunday, and spoke to nobody."

Hangings take place on Mondays.
It's the big scaffold at the Bailey
covered in black, the size of a showman's
caravan, it takes most of Sunday
to erect and by evening they start
to come, the crowds. By breakfast
the place is humming, all across
Snow Hill and Newgate market
they wait. What's she having
for a last breakfast? The coffee stalls
are doing well, the pie and pudding sellers
arrive. When she comes out
the men will, as they always do,
take their hats off and the crowd
will cheer and sing
"Oh my! I think I've got to die!"
Where, I wonder, did she meet
Johnny's father?

"I had nothing but a gown and two caps
when I went there. I laid in on Saffron Hill
in Chick Lane; my child was a week old
when I got him christened, at Spanish Place."

I was christened at Spanish Place.
The priest nearly refused because
my father was not a Catholic and my mother
had not been going to mass as often
as she should.

There is little of her that's round;
well, not in that soft way
that roundness is normally understood,
just her breasts, and since Johnny,
her belly. He slices through one
breast, stale milk shoots -
damn's his eyes - then flows
down the channel, into the bucket
below. He cuts, and comes again.

Her ribs are stretched and open,
Newgate tulips, droopy from the noose.
He cuts out her lungs and heart,
weighing each in his hands,
exploring their density and stench.
It's getting messy now,
a new bucket must be fetched
before he can explore her womb.

"He was a fortnight old when he died;
I got him buried at St Mary-le-bone church;
I was ill for a week after that, and was never
out of doors. I told the gentleman I had no-one
to look for the woman who took the child
to be buried; she moved, and nobody
knew where she was gone. My child was buried
in High Street, Mary-le-bone, in an old burying
ground, the woman, whose house I laid in at,
took it with her son to be buried;
her husband worked in the country.
I never went into that road on the Saturday.

I am as innocent as a baby unborn,
and leave it to the gentlemen of the Court to look
into my case, for I have not a person
in the world to do anything for me. I told
the gentleman everything the moment
he took me.

Her womb is surprisingly empty.
Nothing there for him at all,
just string, pulp and stale blood.

He asks for a third bucket,
plunges his hands into what's left,
searches one last time.