Three Poems by V.R. 'Bunny' Lang
PN Review 274, November - December 2023
Poem (‘You kill me’)
You kill me. Yes you do.
I know no one else who’d
Buy a sparrow (I
Didn’t even know they sold sparrows)
Just to feed it watermelon
And in public, too.
Every afternoon I think of you
Out there, flushed and fair
Scraping the exhausted rind with a spoon.
Every day! All winter.
The Recidivists
My first is to my finger
As my third is to my thumb.
We came in by the fire escape,
But we’ll leave by the last room.
We’ll take the silver and the bedding.
We’re very taking persons.
Be too taken, we’ll take too
The hope from your sleeping face.
Frightened crows
Take fear and run. Their wings
Mudspattered and thin.
Rats run while you can.
We’ll take you. Take two.
Break you, break you, and as we do
We eat ourselves up with appetite.
I hate you, I hate you,
One to the other whispers.
Listen.
You are a liar,
And your cat has no gums.
I do not know the rain from the rats,
Or the rats from my thumb,
But you are a liar,
My first was the first of the world.
Poem (‘White of eye, blond of bone’)
White of eye, blond of bone,
The victim always hunts alone:
Yes, I wore this very dress
The night that Virgil died –
And you, as stricken as you were
Remember! I believe you are
What I’ve been looking for,
And will pretend you were
Not married, nor had a Russian analyst,
Did not eat soup at dinner or refuse
Alcohols, or chew coffee spoons,
Or belch. Such is my faith. For yours:
I only ask you break with me
Almonds; my eyes are limes,
Now yours to squeeze. Or slice
For lemonades. My fingernails
Were not what you observed,
But dames. Not damson plums.
Not dredged with septic stains.
Ladies, ladies’ hands. See, lines of pain
Perform upon the potted palms.
From PN Review 274, November - December 2023.
The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems by V.R. ‘Bunny’ Lang, edited by Rosa Campbell, will be published by Carcanet this month - use the code FEBBOOKS to pre-order it with 20% off and free UK P&P.
V.R. 'Bunny' Lang (1924-1956) was a poet, playwright, actress and director born in Boston, the youngest of six daughters. She was a founding member of the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, Massachussetts in 1950, where she staged two verse dramas, Fire Exit (1952) and I Too Have Lived in Arcadia (1954), and starred in multiple other productions, including the original performance of Frank O'Hara's Try! Try! (1951). Her poetry was widely published in her lifetime, particularly in POETRY, and she was, for a time, editor of the Chicago Review. She died of Hodgkin's disease at the age of thirty-two.
Rosa Campbell lives in Edinburgh, and is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews, where she also teaches modern and contemporary literature. Her poetry has appeared in various places, including Oxford Poetry, fourteen poems, Perverse, Ambit, Gutter and SPAM. Her first book, Pothos, a memoir-ish lyric essay about grief and houseplants, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021.
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