Adelle Stripe - Bad Blood

Over the water, plastic bags hang,
mottled old rags in the cold March wind,
litter from floods, the sirens are forming
an old alphabet from these river trees;
alder, birch, willow and blackthorn
shelter my head in a dense canopy,
their trickling branches fracture the headlights,
polythene strangles my ash prayer tree.

River flows wild through the harpies’ wood,
each plastic bag a broken genealogy,
twine from a rope my only way up,
faces from way back burned in the bark;
who wove silk blankets in Spitalfields attics
and fled persecution from mad Brabant Catholics,
and butchered wild boars and bled them from trees,
and dug up the bones of a buried crusader,
who lived in the poorhouse on dry bread and jam,
and drew charcoal visions haunted by Mahler,
a head, garroted by a forklift truck,
and washed the soiled pants of the James Bond creator,

who beat her three children with a cherry tree branch,
who could not keep his prick in his pants,
who drove through red lights on a half pack of Mogadon,
who threw plates and knives at the heads of each other,
who plotted to throw the body of his boss
into the swill trough of Gloucester Old Spots,
whose spindly fingers wore stolen jade rings,
who almost murdered his brother at axe point,
who gouched out on brown for a birthday treat,
and liked his short time as a prisoner of war
escaped up the Kwai, the moonlight his torch,

who hid from the Reich in a Dutchman’s kitchen,
and interred the gloves of a rapist goalkeeper,
and fell four flights through a scaffolding hoard
the blood made a pattern like lace on the trees,
who gassed herself and all of her children -
each one given a tiny white coffin
(the city’s processions like the death of a king),

who gave her son a coal sack for Christmas
to teach him a lesson he’d never forget,
and threw his ex-wife down two flights of stairs
beating her so hard her spleen split apart,
and dreamt up the Co-op savings stamp,
lost a million pounds and drank himself to death,
who watched dead bodies piled 20ft high
scooped up with diggers on the old Grave Bridge,
who translated insults for Old Joe and Adolf -
his payment, a flat full of Austrian rough trade,

who always managed to bed the blondes
with afterbirth stains under his fingers,
who picked up a curse from a Thoth tarot deck
and lost half her hair on a stained pink pillow,
who kept the boys fed on rock salt and beastings,
had sex with a tree on a double dollar dip,
who had her own daughter disfellowshipped
and eloped to a trailer park in Fresno,
her children had lice, they ate out of dog bowls.

Each twisted branch of my own family tree
is strangled with plastic, the past as a prayer;
no leaves on the branches, just mud on the bark
that cuts at my hands when the frayed rope swings.

Adelle Stripe is a founding member of the Brutalist Poets and lives in Mytholmroyd. Her writing has appeared in The Times, The Stool Pigeon, Guardian, and Caught by the River. She has released three poetry collections on Blackheath Books. This poem is taken from her recent publication Dark Corners of the Land, which was a Scotsman Book of the Year and won Poetry Book of the Year at the 2012 3:AM Awards. Adelle is currently a PhD student at the University of Huddersfield, and is researching a biography of the Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter. Read more here.

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