The Starfish & Other Poems by Isabel Galleymore
PN Review 232, November - December 2016
The Starfish
creeps like expired meat –
fizzy-skinned, pentamerously-legged,
her underfur of sucking feet
shiver upon an immobile mussel
whose navy mackintosh is zipped
against the anchor of this fat paw,
this seemingly soft nutcracker who exerts
such pressure until the mussel’s jaw
drops a single millimetre. Into this cleft
she’ll press the shopping bag of her stomach
and turn the mollusc into broth,
haul in the goods and stumble off,
leaving a vacant cubicle,
a prayer come apart.
The Barnacles
Think of them now – Invincible, Endeavour,
well-endowed with this swamping thatch
of teeth, this citadel of calciferic bedsits
their single occupants can never leave –
what is it about November that washes
urge into this one’s sinus-heart
eliciting his wily pipette
that with its several accordion folds
stretches beyond his stuck-fast self
to become a proboscis, a blind man’s stick
abristle with sniffing as it wavers and knocks
against his lady neighbour’s operculum doors
only to break off like part of the rigging
when the mood no longer takes him.
The Slipper Limpet
In the double-dark of the sea at night,
in a shoe of shell, a stomach-foot
with a growing appetite
invites a dozen to generate
a vertical queue, a carefully organised high-rise
orgy with her, its founding member,
its queen sticking to the ocean bedrock
as smaller, younger males shuffle on top
and when she’s tired of the day-in day-out
rut, when her gills have breathed their last,
her nearest male inherits her sex –
two moons and he’s bequeathed
her duct – and yet he’ll remain stuck on her
empty bone slipper, departed Cinderella.
The Crab
Sublittoral place in which this crab sits
like the lid of a pie, its crimped edge
rests upon a mixture of pincers, legs –
two black dactyls that headline the others
dressed in the fizz and stubble of brick.
It’s these bone clothes the crab outgrows
the way song, lifting a decibel, bursts
a glass; there’s some civil upheaval
that allows the crab to break open
and quickly reverse out from itself –
a faded, vulnerable replica,
a soft ball of milk with milk’s film skin
searching for a stone to hide beneath
for the time it takes to scab over.
Choosing
from eight million differently constructed hearts –
I couldn’t – I choose to love them all:
the squid’s triptych of pumps,
the snake inside its cardial sac, growing as it eats.
To say nothing will come between us,
to stay benignly intimate was –
sometimes not calling was easier,
sometimes I’d forget to touch you
and you, and you – a natural phenomenon
‘dwindling’ – one of a dozen breakups
from the world each day –
like the others it seemed you’d just popped out
for a pint of milk and now
nothing’s conjured hearing your name.
Isabel Galleymore’s first collection, Significant Other (Carcanet, 2019), won the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize and Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize. Her pamphlet, Cyanic Pollens (Guillemot Press, 2020) is based on her residency in the Peruvian Amazon. She lectures at the University of Birmingham.
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