'Trigeminal Neuralgia' and Other Poems by Martina Evans
PN Review 227, January - February 2016
Trigeminal Neuralgia
I tell her that an early night makes all the difference to the pain.
I try to get to bed by ten, but it’s now quarter to one
and she’s still on the couch,
looking at me, wrapped in my woollen hat
with her metaphorical chin in her metaphorical hand.
She’s wondering if it’s Liadain leaving the nest
that’s caused it or perhaps it’s the pressure
of having memorised my own poems.
Her forefingers chop out a chunk in the air
to show me there’s only room for so much.
I touch my hand to my woollen brow –
feel a poem coming on.
Shakespeare Knew Cats
What, drawn, and talk of peace! I hate the word
as I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee!
He is not complimentary, no doting Facebook snapper
a man of his time when it comes to the despised feline.
One weird sister has Greymalkin and Bendedick says,
Hang me in a bottle like a cat and shoot me while Tybalt
is the Prince of Cats. If we hadn’t named the usurping
Burmese from De Beauvoir Road, The Viper
because of his threatening neck moves,
he would be Tybalt. Do you bite your thumb at me sir?
no, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir but I bite my thumb, sir.
You lie! Off it kicks as Donny-Romeo leaps in defence –
I run below the high fence imploring like Benvolio,
part fools, put up your swords you know not what you do!
to all I can see of Donny-Romeo his tail bloated with rage,
deaf to me, roaring, it fits when such a villain is a guest.
I’ll not endure him. The ladies on the balcony,
Dora and Alice get on their hind legs to watch the show,
the gold and green of their eyes vanishing into dark
pupils burning like coals as the toms crash along
the honeysuckled pergola, giant eyes fixed on one another.
This stupidity will come back to bite you, Donny-Romeo.
Fang to fang is no holy palmer’s kiss – it is life and death
when teeth carry poison that but one month ago made
your ginger cheek round as an orange. AIDS
and feline flu are passed freely over these garden walls
and The Viper-Tybalt is impervious to the water weapon.
Hose and rattling steel buckets have I used on him
while he stands his dripping ground like a princox, a saucy boy
wilful choler makes him shake and I am as helpless
as before my own wilful self. This like everything human
will be played out on the hormones, I won’t be given a say
until I’m nursing Donny-Romeo, dealing with the bitterest gall
the veterinary bill, broken bones.
Wuthering Heights
for Kraige Trueman
It’s never far away from me despite
being no longer young or romantic
and when Dora runs free across the pergola
she reminds me more of Kate Bush
than a Norwegian Forest Cat.
It was the darkness
that captured me years ago:
Lockwood in his oaken Georgian bed,
the sliding panels like a coffin
Cathy calling outside
the cruelty of her arm sawn across the glass.
Even in my dreams last night when Liadain
came down to the basement
frantic to tell me that someone was
calling and knocking in the back garden
outside my casement window
and even in my stark terror when I lifted
my head from under the covers
in the lightening room –
which I could see was empty now
except for Dora’s shaggy silhouette –
I couldn’t help asking the dream-Liadain
even though I knew the real Liadain
was still asleep in her own room,
was it like Wuthering Heights?
Meds to the Morgue
Each final year student had an engagement
with a dead body. I can’t remember what
only the meds scanning the Death Notices,
the scrunch of the Cork Examiner and the crash of a chair
to the Kampus Kitchen floor before they jumped
on the Number 8 bus or bicycles speeding to the Regional.
Later in Lower Holloway, I X-rayed a man’s sinuses,
he said he’d been using a lot of Vicks
and he smelt like the bar of an electric heater
left on in a dusty room. In the light,
I couldn’t believe the way the cancer bubbled like champagne
and the Registrar snatched the film out of my hand
to run to the Viewing Box from where
he called all the flapping white coats
and they were smiling like those faces the night
Whittington doctors packed behind the Cat Scan control panel
to watch a thoracic aortic aneurism
bleed live, slice after slice.
Martina Evans is an Irish poet, novelist and teacher. She is the author of twelve books of prose and poetry. Her latest collection American Mules (Carcanet 2021) won the Pigott Poetry Prize 2022 and was a TLS and Sunday Independent Book of the Year. Martina’s next collection, The Coming Thing, will be published in September 2023.
Martina has been Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London from 2003-2007 and again in 2011-2012. She has run workshops in Ireland, UK, Switzerland and the U.S. and seminars at London Metropolitan University, The National Film & Television School and Goldsmiths. She has been an associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University and University of East London and a Creative Writing tutor at the City Literary Institute, Covent Garden, London for many years. Currently she a Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and Books Critic for the Irish Times.
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