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    Flood
    Flood
    Flood
    Ebook94 pages39 minutes

    Flood

    By Jessica Mookherjee

    ()

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    About this ebook

    In Flood, Jessica Mookherjee inhabits several identities in her 'bone-framed coat'. With overarching themes of migration, otherness, sexual awakening, and maternal mental illness, we encounter the aftermath of catastrophe, of loss and being lost.
    Here, 'time folds us into origami boats' – and the poems swell with the surging tides of youth and of becoming, of what we inherit and what we forge as our own path – and what happens when we jump into the depths and experience life in full-flow. Alive with wildlife and nightlife, mythmaking and bad romance, the everyday and the otherworldly, Flood is a prodigious debut collection from a truly distinctive and vital voice, now reissued in this new edition by Nine Arches Press.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNine Arches Press
    Release dateDec 12, 2024
    ISBN9781916760011
    Flood
    Author

    Jessica Mookherjee

    Jessica Mookherjee lives in Kent. Her work appears in many journals including Agenda, Poetry Wales, The North, Rialto, Under the Radar, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and in various anthologies including Bloodaxe’s Staying Human. She was highly commended in the 2017 and 2021 Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem. She is author of two full collections, Flood (Cultured Llama, 2018) and Tigress, ( Nine Arches Press 2019) which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Munthe Prize for Best Second Collection in 2021. She is a joint editor of Against the Grain Poetry Press.

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      Book preview

      Flood - Jessica Mookherjee

      I.

      Churn

      The Flesh Leaves

      A road, paths, and a series of moments,

      shaking hands, you tell me you’re dying,

      that you’d never again remember this…

      being one thing after another, as flesh leaves,

      I exist one second to the next. You speak

      about a limpet dislodged from a rock.

      Caught on a fierce wave – saw such visions,

      then returned by the flood, others called him Messiah.

      You’re covered in leaves, on a cliff’s edge,

      with a tree’s memory, asking where chaos

      comes from. A phone call, a cigarette, hunger,

      thirst, a promise. I don’t keep love letters…

      You say leaves don’t keep you warm.

      Can you face where you are going? You smile,

      say we’ll jump holding hands … into the sea.

      It can end anywhere, I think of hollow ways,

      green lanes, ancient walkways, travel slowly,

      call me, I mean it. We made a deal.

      1967

      Here is a girl out of place. Stranger

      and strangeness, both cold and grey.

      Her sari billows in English winds, a pale

      princess clutching her wedding gold.

      Red lips and bride-mark like a wound

      on her head, she walks behind him.

      She walks away from here, away from

      her mother, father – who gave her to him.

      How quickly the shame sets in.

      Feeling dirty under clean British sheets.

      Alone and out of time as her bleeding stops

      and her first child starts to kick.

      Small

      I called you minnow, in those shambles of afterbirth,

      where I was splayed in mad shame.

      I made rainbows from oil-slicked pools on the hospital

      floor. I should know your name in this room

      where I am struck dumb with these smells

      of haemorrhage. I name you snow, woebegone.

      They dressed you in white, put you in my arms.

      My breath is too short to call out your name.

      The Milk

      My Bengali mother had no idea why I wore a daffodil.

      So the ladies fed me Welshcakes

      and told me why I wore a black hat on St David’s Day.

      Dewi Sant, I wasn’t sure

      who he was, but I thought I heard him in the waves

      off the Mumbles Head.

      I had no grandmothers here, just the mamgus on the bus.

      Those crinkled Bridgets

      were my wet-nurses, feeding me chewing gum,

      peppermints and their native tongue.

      Those old ladies fed me stories of frost-covered forests

      and Bendigeidfran.

      They were my milk. It’s comin’ in, see they said

      – with an eye on the wind,

      come and pray with us … I went to their chapel,

      where the wood is worshiped

      and where they had me believe that the desert Bible lands

      were in the mountains of North Wales.

      Mamgu - Welsh for Grandmother

      Bendigeidfran - a giant from Welsh myth.

      Glass Sisters

      Kuan-Yin was locked in a glass case

      for most of the seventies and eighties.

      She is still there, almost forgotten

      next to other relics, pottery, from Bangladesh.

      We were all cabinet curios,

      waking occasionally, trapped behind glass,

      under small locks, tiny keys.

      Gingerly, with a smell of fresh rose-water

      she would take us out, sit us on the sofa,

      while she played with a typewriter,

      practising her name. No-one but us

      saw her hair unbraided,

      cascades of shining black.

      Her fingers spelling, yours sincerely,

      clicking on the white Olympus –

      I could get a job,

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