Five Poems

Naomi Foyle

 Naomi Foyle was born in London, England and grew up in Liverpool, and Saskatchewan, Canada.  She currently lives in Brighton, UK, where she works as a poetry tutor and Tarot card reader, and is completing a Creative Writing PhD.  Her debut collection, The Night Pavilion (Waterloo Press), was an Autumn 2008 Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Naomi Foyle

Waiting for someone who never calls,
I check my mobile, touch up my lipstick,
and twist a paper napkin into a swan.

Outside, in the faintly glazed day,
Hampstead High Street is a concrete catwalk
of fur hats, Ugg boots, tassled leather bags,

diamanté muzzles, flowered wellies, baby buggies,
incognito celebs and designer shop assistants
pouting toward Starbucks to be bored.

I take a sip of mint tea
and an old woman in a faded Mac
appears on the other side of the glass.

Her face a crumpled moon, she beams
at a younger, ginger version of herself.
Blotchy-cheeked, her eyes as round as pennies,

the daughter nestles closer
as, with an arthritic finger, her mother
points out the shisha between us,

tracing the curves of its serpentine nozzle,
silver bowl for fruit tobacco,
bulbous water chamber.

I know that I am gaping.
I want the world to stop.
These two small, homely people

are radiant, lit from within by gladness
to be alive, to be together. They laugh
and it’s clear,

the street’s smoky blend
of SUV fumes, stale Chanel and January damp
is the freshest air on earth.

Wrapped up warmly
in each other,
they leave me stranded in my seat,

the daughter swaying on the edges of her feet,
hands cramped beneath her wrists
like the beaks of beautiful birds.

The Morning After

Naomi Foyle

 It was windy on the beach.
 My hair lashed my face,
 and the gulls were gliding for miles,
 crying without flapping their wings.  I stood
 and watched the sun play dice with diamonds,
 shaking and scattering them out to the horizon,
 where sailboats, stiff and pale as young nuns,
 skimmed over the glittering sea. The sky
 raised a baby breath cloud.
  I stretched out on the pebbles, but, restless,
 sat up, stirred by the curves of the birds.
Alert as the light, I absorbed
 the slow roar of the waves
 arriving again and again at the shore,
 then slipping away, each under the next,
 like a woman yawning in bed,
 then tossing the sheet off her body,
 each night and every morning, her own tides
 of sleeping and waking,
 rolling in and rolling out,
 always the same,
 no matter what happens
when the next wave crashes
and something new occurs.

You Never Say Goodbye to a Myth

Naomi Foyle

Our flight home from Athens
was delayed seven hours,
so we spent our last euros
on bread rolls and water,
then brandished the plastic
and gatecrashed McCafe,
demanding glasses and ice.
Giggling and glowing,
we sat on an orange banquette,
sipping cut-price champagne
and cracking pistachios,
watching a Japanese couple
play whist. Pissed with finesse,
discussing how love changes sex,
we kissed until we knew
a creaking bed in a cheap hotel
was not to be the last
Greek temple dedicated to
our metamorphosis

Occupational Hazards

Naomi Foyle

After a hot day digging
I close my eyes
to orgiastic visions
of roots and leaves and stems
dirtily worming through
my sleepy, earth-bound head.

After hours of deep sea diving,
I half-slumber in a hammock,
watch schools of silver fish
swarm inside my skull,
nibble at the coral
of my brain.

After reading palms all evening
I enter the blood web of night:
broken girdles of Venus,
crimson via lascivia,
etching worry and attachment
into the eyelids of my dreams.

Teutonic Shifts

Naomi Foyle

Years ago, art from Berlin was globby, alive — paintings
of Jesus with small pox, monstrous felines strafing the city night skies.

On the streets, performance artists built and ate a wall
of jammy bread, while in London industrial music demiurges

Einstürzende Neubauten destroyed the floor of the ICA: jack hammering
into the subterranean corridors that connect Buck Palace and the Mall.

The gallery pulled the plug at damage of three grand. The band,
booked as a ‘theatre of destruction’, refused to pay the bill. Autonomen

& angels ruled Berlin, grandmothers skateboarded
to lesbian balls, dressed to kill in vintage bondage frocks.

Today at the ICA the work is monochromatic, clean. Videos
set on random vignette; wooden models of V1-rockets

resembling kindergarten fish. I head to the archives
search for human voices in the trays of techno CDs. Sigh

and wander back downstairs. View a photo
of a Stasi recreation camp in evening light: pink and yellow

as a slice of Battenberg cake. Across the room another photo:
a concrete tunnel erected in a traffic intersection.

Defying the curator’s disregard for context, a gallery assistant
reveals what comes from the East, where these hollow spaces don’t belong.

“It’s all very cool,” I venture. “What do you mean?” “Well,”
I improvise, “it’s not about … catastrophe … there’s no emotion in it.”

“The curator was trying to move away from those clichés,” he says,
then, pointing to bright blobby swirls,

a high-gloss sheet of multiply-xeroxed paint,
suggests that catastrophe, by being silenced, is very much implied.

I let him escort me to a Mini Cooper, take the driver’s seat,
watch a video projected on the wall, hear Heidegger’s thoughts

on the clearing away of old gods, the dwelling place of art, dubbed
over Hollywood car chases and beach blanket bingo montage.

But I wish I was back in a Trebbie, the cardboard car
I once drove around ‘The Last Watchtower’ of the wall —

a turret squatted by a gang of Ossi art punks, hanging photos of their mates
hurling pfennigs out of windows to a desperate, scrabbling crowd.

Now Berlin is new, phenomenology is fun,
palace skivvies run underground errands fearing not Krautrock attack;

Wanting sly mayhem, cabaret and urban angst is like craving acid
at a rave. Get with it, girl. Crunch that Ex-Stasi.

My favourite piece is the crate made out of an old egg storage building.
Thin, peeling slats. Fragile incubator for infertile souls. I can live with that