Marks and Sparks by Rachel Dealtry

Character: Female, Northern, Fifties

I pick up the plastic globe off the chest of drawers; one of our grandchildren put it there. I notice as I lift it up the circle of clean polished oak that it leaves behind. I am a slut in the house.

BEAT

Housework to me is like the corn on my left foot - extremely painful, but nevertheless needs dealing with eventually. I study the globe for a while and realise that Ireland is only a tiny fingernail away from here, a tiny little fingernail away from me. Yet I am here and he is there and that fingernail between us feels as vast as the Sahara desert, and all the chocolate teacakes in the world will not make me feel any better about that.

Some days, I stand in the queue at Marks and Sparks and I wonder where it all went wrong. I look at the other women in there and I want to scream, it’s because no-body says what they are really thinking or feeling. I have very violent thoughts towards the counter clerks and I put them aside because it is not appropriate for a woman of my age to have thoughts like this.

I’m looking down the toilet and I can see yellow brown urine frothing in the bottom of the pan. I've told William a million times to flush it, but he doesn't listen to me. I walk over to the sink and fetch his toothbrush, his is the blue one, everything that William owns has been shopped for by me. I take it over to the toilet and I dip it into the froth, I then walk over to the sink and I place it neatly back into the holder.

William is unaware of my habitual urine dipping.

William is generally unaware of me.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the full length mirror and I remove my dressing gown, I look at myself good and hard. I like the curve that my spine makes at the small of my back and my      breasts are still in good shape considering what they have been through. It’s the middle bit that disgusts me, the way it hangs over the top of my pants. I grab it with both hands and consider slicing it off. If I sliced it off I will look younger again. I don’t feel like this, I don’t feel like this woman looking back at me. My body no longer fits together with my mind. 

This is painful.

Every Wednesday we eat haddock, boiled potatoes and peas. We generally eat in silence or we discuss our children whom we no longer gain pleasure from. I then go and do the washing         up and William settles himself down in front of the telly.

Today, I wipe down the sides, dry my hands with the tea towel and go to join him. His thick rimmed glasses are sitting awkwardly on his face. I am wearing a new floral dress which William does not notice. He’s engrossed in some quiz programme. I turn to him, very slowly, I take a deep breath and I say:

‘Would you like to see my vagina?’

BEAT

William just stares at the television set and his glasses begin to steam over. I get up and walk towards the window, I pull the curtains across and I lift up my dress to reveal my white cotton undies.

‘Want to see it?’

Silence prevails

‘Do you want to?’

The telephone starts to ring and William’s patting his forehead with a handkerchief. He gets up . . . muttering that it might be one of the children and I feel the blood rushing towards my face ‘LEAVE IT’.

He looks terrified and slumps back into the settee. I walk over to him and block his view of Countdown. I’m willing him to touch me. I’m begging him to reach out to me. A minute goes by and it feels like an hour. I do a one hundred and eighty degree turn and I run, I run to the bedroom and I slam the door nearly off the hinges. (Building) I lay down on the bed and I dream of being in Ireland, I dream of being with him and my body becomes ageless and my thoughts become fire and I realise that I CAN-NOT GO ON LIKE THIS. It has to stop.

BEAT

Tomorrow, whilst doing the weekly shop, I will pop a brand new toothbrush into my basket and when I get home I’ll just replace the old one.

~ END ~

Sestinas explained

For anyone who was blown away by Caity's poem 'On Being Single. Again.' (last post), here is her explanation of how to construct a sestina...

The Sestina

Poetry I am told feels a bit alien to a lot of people, and the idea of using a structured form seems pointless and unnecessarily difficult. It won’t be something everyone comes back to  - but after explaining what it is, I have used the poem I have posted as an example you might want to try :)

The sestina is a 6 stanza plus ‘envoi’ poem. ‘Envoi’ in this case is a sort of three line recap. You don’t have to rhyme, you can pick your number of syllables per line  - your meter…. Eg pentameter is five ‘units’ of rhythm, and a ‘unit’ of rhythm can be for example a pair of stressed and unstressed syllables

(di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum di-dum being Iambic Pentameter because of the order of stressed and unstressed syllables)

The poem only uses 6 ‘end words’ – literally the last word of each line - repeated in a set formula pattern, and uses the words in the same order as the first Stanza (although this can vary) in the last 3 lines . 

The order of the end words is set in that pattern - use numbers 1-6 if that makes more sense to you. 

Using my poem as an example the end words are as follows (which you sort of hope people don’t notice)

A         cigarette

B          one

C         spent

D         fire

E          close

F          set

F          set

A         cigarette

E          close

B          one

D         fire

C         spent

C         spent

F          set

D         fire

A         cigarette

B          one

E          close

E          close

C         spent

B          one

F          set

A         cigarette

D         fire

D         fire

E          close

A         cigarette

C         spent

F          set

B          one

           

B          one

D         fire

F          set

E          close

C         spent

A         cigarette

AB       cigarette, one

CD       spent fire

EF        end set

           

It is almost like a spiral of words (if that is a helpful image) and the tricks are

• firstly to chose your ‘end words’ quite carefully, using words that have several meanings  - like set, which has the most dictionary defined meanings I learned, and or words that have homophones (one/won, vain/vein. Whine/wine which are permissible variants to the form )
• you could use end words which have a some overlapping or connected meaning – spent /end/close,
• very careful use of caesura (pauses using full stops/commas/colons) and lines. By this I mean that for a poem to make sense you don’t read it line by line, you read it grammatically as you would a piece of prose. This way the end word don’t seem too obvious (or at least that’s the aim)…

so you could read a piece of poetry like this,

with commas at the end of every line,

and then you’ll find that nothing goes amiss,

but you might have a verse which doesn’t rhyme.

Or

You could read a piece of poetry. Like

this. Not commas at the end

of every line. And then you’ll find

that nothing goes

amiss; but you might have

a verse that doesn’t rhyme.

You are still able to follow the meaning. The example above shows how that can impact the way you write, the sound and the sense (it doesn’t mean I think its good – or not good  - or that these lines make sense, its just an example of what to think about )

And if you do give yourself a syllable limit (iambic pentameter being the fave for many because it is naturally very close to normal English speech pattern) there’s likely to be more rhythm and completeness in your poem – but not always

There are other types of formal structure like a villanelle, A pantoum, Sonnet,

all of which are also shorter – if that sounds preferable

The discipline of writing in a formal way actually helped in writing this I think, and the structure definitely came first, which sounds like it might be artificial but it still conveys a sense and meaning ( mostly) and all language we use is confined in rules of syntax grammar and spelling – so think of it as an extension of that.

In this poem I thought of the end words first, wanted it keep it mostly easy but then thought I better give myself something more jarring to see if it flowed – so threw ‘cigarette’ in because I had the image of a spiral like a spiral of cigarette smoke. That made me think of a conversation I’d had once in a coffee bar and that lead to thinking of bits and pieces of other peoples relationship endings  - this is not autobiographical, and not meant to be an angsty outlet, but this – and any poem – is meant to be about distilling an idea/ideas into a poetic form to create an emotional resonance with the reader and using the form to help in that – otherwise write prose. A sestina just gives you a frame to hang it on. I had to edit this poem and double check on grammar and line breaks – and I think there are still some dodgy moments – but it felt like going through the task really helped me think about line and form generally – and was well worth doing for me for that reason alone.