When I get lonely, I visit my local tip. Apart from Wednesdays, I am guaranteed to find someone about, willing to help me get rid of a load of stuff which, up to that point, had prevented me from moving on in life. One time I discarded so much of my old junk that back home I noticed the front door sign was gone, and the post box which had my name on it. I got in and a woman I’d never met before was moving about hoovering. She was wearing my shoes.
© Maria Stadnicka January 2021
© JStadnicki ‘The Wait’ January 2021
ask about someone lost
in an escape gone wrong /
they will point at a place
of returning where things
talk themselves out of paper
so loudly it is impossible
to miss them even if you can
barely hear at all / peculiar how
eternal-now locks everything
indoors / before too long
hair grows in old toys
in furniture without memory
© Maria Stadnicka, January 2021
(for F. M. )
after many hospital visits
and the nurse has left a message
that you are now an embryo.
Chromosome – parity – sequence:
one, two, four then another snowfall
before your mother and I buy curtains.
It is a strange place for snow, our road,
our house and the courtyard with dried herbs
grieving for your lateness. Miracle Grow.
In hindsight, if magic existed
it would have been weaponised by now.
Trust science with your heart,
grow spare valves, ventricles for all the lies
the world tells you. The biggest deceit is
that your future is set in stone.
© Maria Stadnicka, January 2021
(fragment)
Father they signed me up for research
and as soon as the paperwork passed
the Ethics Committee, they asked for
samples of tissue from my left eye.
Sacrifice my vision in the name of science,
check my womb for blackness but say black
only if you really mean it. Father, we all eat
pasta with mud and no-one complains that
the earth lacks seasoning. Yes, please, I need
another portion of this, sleep-walk
into the garden, repeat instructions
from qualified staff: Take a deep breath!
Take a deep breath!
Amen.
© Maria Stadnicka, October 2020
Full version published in International Times on 10 October 2020. Available at: http://internationaltimes.it/homologia/.
© JStadnicki, Studio MMXIX
Nietzsche insists that a person must
find at least one truth before a good
night sleep. A terrible prospect
considering how facts come about,
with their own sets of variables.
wind force,
speed in metres per second,
momentum at impact
with a surface, temperature
and friction between molecules
Ninety-degree angles do not exist
in real life. Until now science tricked
us into believing in verticality.
Meanwhile it builds a simplified version
of the world, a dummy manual, if you like,
for funding purposes.
© Maria Stadnicka, 2020
Photograph © Saul Leiter
Dreamed we were eating
pasta with mud and no-one
complained that earth lacked
seasoning. Yes, thank you,
since you ask, I will have
another portion of this.
At present it makes life
bearable.
© Maria Stadnicka, June 2020
Photo: © JStadnicki, June 2020
Curtains go up on a scene
whose rear walls are shaking;
stagehands clear the background.
Spotlights on at the cast’s entrance.
I am your memory, he says,
and the back rows answer
with cheers and whistles. Heat
rises from our seats to the LEDs’
green flicker on the ceiling.
Breath-monologue, breath-monologue:
the script unravels, lines break
interrupted by adverts for bleach,
toothpaste, locally sourced colours.
The show flows until the speed
of a camera flash sets off a fire alarm.
Curtains down for emergency exit.
We push against tar-water dams,
open floodgates then move
to the front seats for a better view.
The theatre holds the roof up.
Every moment of terror begins like this.
It matches our lives so well,
It is us performing onstage.
© Maria Stadnicka, June 2020
© Maria Stadnicka, June 2020
Photography: © John Stadnicki
Gloucestershire, Midlands, UK / May 2020
I figure out that if you live by water and feel hungry, it takes an afternoon of chewing yesterday’s leftovers to feel mud on your tongue. And if a passer-by gives you a bad apple, you ought to be thankful, appreciate what you’ve got, watching others dying of starvation. But when you hear that the well-wisher was God, which happened to be running late for a meeting in the nearby mansion, you wish you had spat the rotting fruit back at Him. God could have done better. By then it is too late. The meeting He was rushing to would be running on and on for years. For as long as your lifetime.
© Maria Stadnicka, May 2020
Photography: © John Stadnicki, May 2020
