SUZANNA SLACK

Crowning 2023

1.

UHU, Mia Farrow’s cup, LACK floating shelves from IKEA the orange cafe kiosk at the
industrial estate on Longmead Road staffed by a 1950s pin-up, daisy daisy and the
weeping willow.  The executive producer (and writer) of the tv show’s expression: “Itsu or
Pret Day”.

Spit roast by eyes and pretty sunrises and sunsets, a princess dreading DHL bringing

Paloma Wool.  Was non disclosure of facial aesthetics some sort of messing with the world
order.  The Food Bank.  Hunger and bluebells, a Romanian shop selling pottery and
sausages and slippers with little coloured eggs in the window, and I kept on snapping dead
bramble for spiky kindling.  “Grandma stands before an icon and prays” wrote Svetlana
Alexievich.  To race across the world.  I lived striped again, a chocolate hopeful.

The definition of infantile: to need to see your mother treated with love, properly cared for.
Is it? I was asked, I don’t know if it’s defined somewhere but I’m going to say so, yes.

All those long stems and wavy particles - clusters of forest - if you poke the moon with a
stick, it’s like dogshit and it flicks everywhere - don’t do it - lead mines in that part of the
North.  Lead mines, the moon on a stick, don’t poke the moon - don’t flick the moon -
skullduggery, sculleries, coal scuttles, being scurrilous, humbuggery - Spent Bell Pits
Hushes - large scarred areas (usually gullies).  Heavy metal,

poor metal, the oldest metal.  The scythe, divination and the forming of Rome.  A metal

with a bad reputation: “become scoria..all of them are brass, and tin and iron, and lead, in
the midst of the furnace; they have become scoriae of silver” (Ezekiel)

London Clay: bioturbated or poorly laminated blue-grey or grey-brown, slightly calcerous,
silty to very silty clay, clayey silt and sometimes silt with some layers of sandy clay.

Clay became a mire in winter and formed hard ruts in summer, upsetting carts or turning
ankles.  As long as there was gravel left to build on, nobody built on clay with its bad
foundations and wet cellars.

All those

Hidden streams

Houses could find water by digging shallow wells.

No doubt still wet cellars all the way to Old Ford.

2.

I spoke up to prove I wasn’t afraid of the Holborn buckets in twenty ten or the prison men,
Coercion and your multiple daughters-in-law -

When one of mine was referred to one then, do you

have a handful of diamonds to give me?  Are you going to tip them out of those coffee
tins?

We had it hard, and he said I’m sorry about that & I was a beaky crow seizing the crumb.  I
lived the life of Riley the Bowerbird.  A quarter turn tap.  Equipment: oneiric.
A Harris Tweed Baker Boy cap in purple checks, heathers, the reclaimed pond to catch the
gutter runoff.  Gaffer tape to seal a leak, variable weathers, walking stick parasol.  Being
with everyone was everything everywhere and being with nobody was nothing, nowhere.

It was a Tall Tale.

“My philosophy is that what you think of and plan for day by day, in spite of yourself, so to
speak - you will get.  You will get it more or less.  That is, unless you are one of the people
who get nothing in this world.  There are such people.  I have lived too much in mining
works and construction camps not to know that” said Captain Forrester in A Lost Lady by
Willa Cather.

The smell of oude when you got strudels, you were always a journey across a hostile city
or leastways a confusing, noisy one I couldn’t afford, sometimes in the dark and
sometimes in light too bright.  I got into a white car in the dusk, everything became thrilling.

Was “an artist and a queer” always “cruising as a constant methodology”?  There was

never anything sweet or kind about it all to me.  Don’t watch me leave.  I walked through a
quarter with fake cherry + magnolia blossoms in pots outside outdoor tables.  Crashed
steam trains, Russia, Belgrade, men dancing to keep warm in long coats.  Horses
disembarking trains, men breaking horses, horses falling on men, horses pulling cartsfull
of dead men

The cannons go on the trains.  The shadow of the airships.  A kind of r*** inherent in “are
you afraid to embrace your intuition?”  The effort it took to make sacks full of - what? -
sawdust? To teach men to lunge at with bayonets.  The effort of bayonets.  My keeping still
was emerald.  Sunlight is my kryptonite said Selma Blair.  Such a similar familiar place of
pastry, wheat and war.  A long walk to the mines, I was at the foot of my pagoda, Putin was
hungry I carried candles and really, I’m telling you I truly was very emeralded.  I came from
the land of the best kebab, nobody was allowed to spend the night in the wonderworlds of
fruit trees and tulips and softly mowed grass.  Tables and wheelbarrows, got to lie down.
Linda Evangelista, let’s put up the striped awning!  Rabbits hopping could you imagine it.
The girl in the video the chihuahuas of refugees in Rotterdam the fluffiness of the little
waffle the frogspawn of the chia pudding, a dark hotel for vampires, for:

Sunlight was Selma Blair’s kryptonite, remember.  Hearing these giant bells toll, this sonic
layering - this orchestra.  What auditory reckoning was this.  Some gong bath!  I looked up
the discreet silver pin worn by the old man.  Not so discreet.  Why had I called it a
Pleasure Ride, was I aware it sounded lewd, the chambermaids were migrant men the
beef between the Italian autonomist feminists and Selma James and the Women’s Strike
over WHOSE IDEA was “wages for housework”.  Wasn’t Federici a bit terfy said someone
at what was called a seminar where we ate raspberry mousse cake.

Deep deep in the ocean were thermal jets - hydrothermal vents.  Fissures on the sea bed
from which geothermal heated water discharged.  Black smokers, tectonic plates move,
hotspots.  Chimneys in the sea.  Innocence could be powerful and there’s a quest,
because it’s not power like a weapon.  I knew what N & M wrote about innocence and
complicity.  It seemed verboten to be r*******, a word I chose to reclaim.

In the snail wilderness I found my dandelion clock heart.  You carry yourself well despite
these barriers he said oh sure I have superpowers.  Men with bags of sapphires.  I can 

open a tin can full of grapefruit, my parasol is a walking stick.  The little mother of pearl
furniture, Mr Bricolage, vol-au-vents at the council-run care home tipped into shiny black
bin bags By the Rivers of Babylon

3.

Six hydraulic stabilisers. Big white satin shoulder bows then

Supertunica. Spurs from 1661, choupette, beloved by Karl

-ette- mercy not might. The jewelled sword is fixed to

the girdle during thr Byzantine chant. Punish & reform + u may be glorious in all virtue.

The bracelet of it, of sincerity and virtue and never forget the fear + anxiety of your mother
during Knees Up Mother Brown.  There’s no such thing as a modette she used to say
                                noun, suffix: little one.  Diana turning pinwheels gave the prince to

kneel.  Knees up drum horses, chimneys in the sea.  She is Now Mounted lol & haha a
croffle, wet cellars all the way to Old Ford.

Memory’s blossom, cruise theory.  A Baker Boy cap and their white pith helmets, that royal
blue on the Windsor Greys, BBE on Weetabixes I mean Weetabixalikes.  Linda
Evangelista and a handcuffed man, peddle my wheels nobody could sleep there
dismounted, not St Ursula or the chihuahuas of refugees in Rotterdam, a discreet silver
German cross or raspberry mousse + caca, choupette, modette.  Gouda + glades in my
bunches, crisps in my ICE train and my representatives of the Commonwelath.  In curry
goat and lead mines, in fossilised clams and Mia Farrow’s Cup gifted by the Canadian
mounties, the orange kiosk on Longmead Road.  A tunnel of villainy, a lewd pleasure ride,
a drone and men dancing in long coats.  The goldfish castles, karaoke daisies, once in a
lifetime petal, choupette my little chia pudding my little helmet spike my little soft boiled
egg.  At our pagoda hotel for vampires, in our sunny cobbled squares and our kitchenless
kitchens as the giant bells toll!

The vestibule, verboten, that crazy Alsatian and dandelioned.  My little terrier voice played
backwards like Iron Maiden vinyl, Mr Bricolage on the brink of paper clips By the Rivers of
Babylon Hip-Hip.

Hip-Hip.

“so much rehabilitated and reconstructed into that goodness and perpetual innocence that
whiteness extends”

Christina Sharpe From Note 17, Ordinary Notes

Suzanna Slack is the author of the memory trilogy Is This It?, The Poor Children and The Shedding, and another memory trilogy Happy Birthday Story, Luxury Profile and White Spirit Videotelephony.