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Drawing together Jennifer A. McGowan's poetry of myth and folktale, and the frailties – human or otherwise – behind them, With Paper for Feet explores, mostly from a female perspective, the guts it takes to live or – often – die, un-heroically. Her characters laugh, argue, complain, suffer, curse. ...Gold is heavy, and chafes.... aware that more is expected of them, but unwilling to play up. Praise for Jennifer A. McGowan's work ...gritty thought; wit; striking candour – an unafraid recognition of life's richness and desolation; memorable detail; all these are underpinned by a graceful, subtle, quite lovely way with language. Kevin Crossley-Holland ...bedecked with wit, irony, bittersweet folly and dictional-shifts jazzy enough to make a reader dance. Gray Jacobik ... precise, observant and deep into mythology. Claribel Alegría
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SECTION ONE
White Woman Walks Across China With Paper For Feet
The Talking Skull
The Witch Box
Phantom Pains
Mara Speaks
Something About Love
Song of Krampus
Love Like Salt
The Hood
In Granny’s House
Mr Fox
Bird Verdeliò
Briar Roses
Cinderella’s Mother
The Maiden Without Hands
The Horses of the Sea
Curandero
Icarus
A Sort of Love Story
SECTION TWO
Song of the Arms of a Man
Helen: Menelaus, etc.
Troy: Seven Voices
Troy: After The Horse
Pythoness
Tempus Fugue
SECTION THREE
Emilia
Lady Macbeth in Palliative Care
Cordelia in Prison
The Weird Sisters on the Make
Margaret of Anjou
Shakespeare’s Joan
Paulina as Pygmalion
His Most Famous Women
Mary Arden’s Garrets
SECTION FOUR
After the Battle
Bloody Corner
Margery Kempe
Cunning Folk
Another Witch
Nan Bullen
Listening Woman
Pharaoh’s Concubine
Dorothy King Recalls Robert Herrick, Vicar of Dean Prior
SECTION FIVE
Lilith Dreams Again of the End of Time
Mary Magdalene Walks By Another Construction Site
What History Does Not Record
Dinah
Judith and Holofernes
Pillar
Lot’s Wife Considers Reincarnation
Mortifications of the Flesh
Singing Hosanna
Secretary of God
WITH PAPER FOR FEET
Each night, the same approach to a different small house: Qĭng nĭ, yī diăn diăn fàn, diăn diăn shuĭ. Wù yào chī fàn.Please, a little rice, a little water. I need to eat. Duō xiè.Thank you. The right words coming out of my waì guó rén mouth.
Each night, setting up a bivvy against the wind, lighting a small light, writing in my journal stories, memories, forgotten names.
Sometimes I’d get lost in words, stay two or three days. Children would approach: Nĭ weìshĕnme găo cĭ a? Why do you do this?
I’d reply Wŏ de mŭ qīn chūmò wŏ, My mother haunts me, and they’d nod.
The brave would act out my need for a shrine. Sometimes where I camped, I’d leave paper ribbons, small piles of stone. Paper was the only thing to get heavier, not lighter, with use. My words, my attempt to find my mother’s birthscape, how or if I could fit into it: heavy.
Yet for all my vocabulary I could not talk, could not trade words, despite having paper for feet.
Could not send my words home, for I didn’t know where,
and what parcel box could fit all of me? Nine months of wandering, soaking my feet in flooded fields, pressing pulp to new paper, bleeding ink. White woman alone, her Chinese half never showing.
Finally at the foot of an anonymous hill my mother drifted in
with the mist. Qĭng nĭ, māmā, gĕi wŏ yī diăn diăn fàn.
Please, mother, give me something to live on. I could not see her face, but before she dissolved she spoke my name.
adapted from a Nigerian folktale
A hunter
in search of food for his family
walked and walked
but found no prey.
The plains stretched on
and the sun beat
and he was weary.
There was one tree
that stretched its branches
and he sat beneath it.
Propped his feet
on a white rock
and drank.
When he was rested, he noticed
the rock had two eye-holes
and teeth. Alone
in the vast expanse
except for the sky,
he addressed the rock
in a casual fashion:
‘What brought you here, my friend?’
Then he laughed,
grateful no one could hear him.
So perhaps it is to be forgiven
if the hunter jumped
when the skull fixed him
in its empty gaze and said,
‘Talking brought me here!’
Food and family forgotten,
the hunter ran to the king
to tell him of this wonder
and the king
and all his attendants
went in stately fashion
to see the talking skull.
The plains stretched on
and the sun beat
so it is perhaps to be forgiven
if the king was weary
and rather hot and bothered
when at last they reached the one tree
that stretched its branches.
The king ordered the hunter
to show him the wonder
and the hunter found the skull
and addressed it in a friendly fashion:
‘Greetings again! Please tell my king–
what brought you here?’
But the skull
was silent.
For a long time
the hunter pleaded and implored
questioned and queried
but the skull
might well have been
a white rock to prop his feet on
for all the good it did.
The king was angry.
He had come a long way
and had expected wisdom from beyond the grave
or at least a miracle
that befit his station.
He had his champion
lop off the hunter’s head
and began the long trip home.
Beyond the one tree
the plains stretched on.
Beneath the tree
the skull rolled grinning
over to the hunter’s head and asked,
‘What brought you here, my friend?’
And the hunter’s head said sadly,
‘Talking brought me here!’
And underneath the shaded earth
other skulls set up a clattering.
Hide the skin of a seal-woman. She’ll cry
of course, but she’ll marry you.
Teach her the rhythms of your day. Breakfast.
Commuting. Nightly pleasures. Teach her
to worship the sun rather than weep
at the moon’s pull. Your children will be strong,
go into a trade where there’s water. Mind
you keep some things to yourself:
shake three grains of salt from the witch-box
every night into each corner of the house;
make sure, last thing last, the skin is locked up
tighter than a shotgun. Mind, now.
If she finds it–if she slips into her unforgotten self–you’ll find
yourself ebbing; you’ll shatter the witch-box, drink only salt
wine.
It happened the week after I chopped down the hawthorn.
A knife-slip, a welter of blood, and time shifts.
Woollen clothes, straw prickling my skin, I moan
in a smoky half-light. A beldame crouches at my feet,
encouraging me to breathe. (This is the time
I die in childbirth. My husband is a woodcutter.)
A hundred years later, my brother is taken by fairies.
Mother and Father talk in whispers through the night,
and Mother cries. My best enemy, Jennet Clark,
tells me he’s run off to sea, or to London–the story
changes with each telling; the important thing is
he doesn’t want us, and that it hurts–but Father
hangs horseshoes, and buries a witch-bottle
under the threshold for good measure.
When the next baby is a girl,
and she deformed, even Jennet is silenced. Father
cuts down a stand of thorn in revenge. I go to town