[Digital Poetics 4.20] Three Poems by Remi Graves
Image by Remi Graves
DIY
she walked out of the painting all flesh, ageing backwards with every step
she picked an elephant out of her fingernail, let it wipe its snotty trunk on her sleeve
a crow flew out of the ground and made her swear secrecy
pierced her cheek with its beak— three drops of blood for two years of silence
the sky turned green, the sun set
she ran through the treadmill of her memories until she came to a small boy lying
about having too many friends to paint any of them
she was thirteen now, the boy was her father
she baked him a commiseration loaf for the disappearance that was yet to come
kneaded the bread as she ran, more and more breathless now
first past the finish line, she stuck out her chest and spread her arms how winners do
she wiped the sweat off her face with a chubby baby hand
stepped into her house, hammered a nail into the wall
then set about looking for something to hang on it.
bois
A boi walks into a wood—
ouch!
If a boi hits their head in the forest,
does not cry out[1]
do they exist at all?
Inside the wood, which is also a word
expect the boi to accept themselves
except the boi is looking for him-
self in and beyond the trees.
Things are starting to stack up
and anyway, everyone is hiding in these wooded words like:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
In the wood the boi starts to change
like Pinnochio’s antithetical doppelganger
he grows when the truth is told;
when he manages to speak and say
a boi in my mind has something to do, to be
and some part of
of himself is
always out- exposed
and it’s hard to face want with a straight face.
Who says desire isn’t difficulty?
Someone who has always got what they wanted
or never wanted anything enough
but for some of us
it's hard to be seen wanting
to want to be seen
to ing when you er
[1] refusing to fall
Portrait of a man disappearing
all sides of him are the back of him—
it doesn’t matter which way he’s facing,
where we’re standing…
he’s an artwork we’ve loved for years
though we hardly understood
we kept coming back
even as the gallery developed increasingly unusual opening times
even as the entrance became harder and harder to reach
its doors deeper and deeper underground
we’d take the lift to the -15th floor
shut doors and still we kept visiting
our four cornered flat pool of wishes, our missing father.
The paint fading, the shapes loosening;
all the while he was trying to walk backwards out of us
as though we’d trapped him inside himself.
On our last visit we had company,
a little boy legs crossed on the floor sketched the painting
nothing like it was of course
he drew the man who wasn’t there with real focus,
tongue stuck out in concentration, looking up every few seconds
his pencil at an angle, lending the image depth
in all the right places.
*
Remi Graves is a London based poet and drummer. A former Barbican Young Poet, their work has been commissioned by St Paul's Cathedral, Barbican and BBC Radio 4. Remi’s debut pamphlet with your chest was published in 2022 by fourteen poems.
