Hera Lindsay Bird

Hera Lindsay Bird

• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781776560714
• eBook ISBN: 9781776561186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

This impressive debut has established Hera Lindsay Bird as a good girl with many beneficial thoughts and feelings. With themes as varied as snow and tears, the poems in this collection shine with the fantastic cream of who she is, juxtaposing many classical and modern breezes. Bird turns her prescient eye on love and loss, and what emerges is like a helicopter in fog or a bejewelled Christmas sleigh, gliding triumphantly through the contemporary aesthetic desert. This is at once an intelligent and compelling fantasy of tenderness, heartbreaking and charged with trees without once sacrificing the forest.

PAIN IMPERATIVES

After Chelsey Minnis

You have to slap yourself in the face with a mohair glove

You have to challenge yourself to a mini-duel

You have to rub your hands on your thighs and think about pain

A little pain comes on, and you get tiresome again

The past is a bad invention that keeps on happening

And it hurts to think about, like an unpaid bill

It’s the wind dragging the desert backwards at night

& it burns you, like a little pastel whip

You have to think like this all day in a cucumber facemask

You have to lie very still and wish you were dead

You have to think ‘love has radicalised me’ & walk around like Helen of Troy

You have to walk around until the ships burn off

It’s beautiful to be so self-absorbed

It’s like being cursed with looking

You look and look and only see your fate

This is ~ reading the entrails of live animals ~

This is ~ spinning a crystal ball on your index finger ~

To make a small ugliness large is a grandiose mediocrity

It’s like the World of Wearable Art

I write this poem like a chastity belt made of bottle caps

Please don’t blame me for all the terrible thing I am about to say to you

It’s so sad to be in love and not enough of it

It’s so sad to been in love and not be still

It’s so sad to be with someone so sad

It’s so sad to want to

The moral of poetry is too lonely to be written

It’s a sad old hygiene, like Cleopatra’s hand soap

This is using a jackhammer to bust open a music box

The box cracks and minor notes come drifting out

Poetry should be democratic—that’s the modern view

It’s like a murder on a train where everyone did it!

This is a shared misery, like crying someone else to sleep

It’s the sugared hole at the top of the mountain where the flag goes in

It’s a bad crime to say poetry in poetry

It’s a bad, adorable crime

Like robbing a bank with a mini-hairdryer

I should never do it—and nor should anyone

But it’s boring to be so tasteful.

It’s like never masturbating to Lucy Liu

I write this poem like double-leopard print

Like an antique locket filled with pubic hair

You have to stay up each night as a love punishment

You have to handcuff yourself to the past and swallow the key

You have to think tragic sex thoughts like fucking in a casket

You have to say true-sounding things and never mean them

You have to look people in the eye, and say ‘uh oh’

You have to drag your heart across the room like a heavy chair

You have to tell yourself what you need and do the opposite

You have to be staggered by the cruelty of it

Life!

I should never have thought I could do it

It’s like playing the violin in fuzzy handcuffs

It’s like the punchline to a long-forgotten joke

Ground down by empires

Blown across millennia by the black winds of destiny

This is breathing through a megaphone

Or begging for mercy in a Russian phrasebook

I write this poem like an obituary in Comic Sans

I write it like suicide hotline hold music

This is a raunchy philosophy, like losing your virginity to Plato

It’s like doing a line of sherbet off a toilet seat

This is a teenage sadness, like going to sleep in a prom dress

This is putting on mascara to cry yourself to sleep

You have to make a career out of your pain

You have to pinch yourself and think ow like you mean it

You have to live to an old age and regret many things

You have to stay alive long enough to want to

You have to fall in love all over again

With the same person all over again

You have to believe in forgiveness, but never do it

It’s an unfair generosity, like having to share a grave

A year goes by and you start having dreams

Wet black flowers pouring out of the telephone

The past stirs behin...

Table of contents

• FRONT COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• WRITE A BOOK
• MIRROR TRAPS
• MONICA
• WAYS OF MAKING LOVE
• HAVING SEX IN A FIELD IN 2013
• IF YOU ARE AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PHARAOH
• HATE
• CHILDREN ARE THE ORGASM OF THE WORLD
• WILD GEESE BY MARY OLIVER BY HERA LINDSAY BIRD
• BISEXUALITY
• THE EX-GIRLFRIENDS ARE BACK FROM THE WILDERNESS
• PLANET OF THE APES
• LOST SCROLLS
• LOVE COMES BACK
• THE DAD JOKE IS OVER
• EVERYTHING IS WRONG
• DAYLIGHT SAVINGS
• HAVING ALREADY WALKED OUT ON EVERYONE I EVER SAID I LOVED
• KEATS IS DEAD SO FUCK ME FROM BEHIND
• NEW THINGS
• PAIN IMPERATIVES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS