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    With Paper for Feet
    With Paper for Feet
    With Paper for Feet
    Ebook106 pages39 minutes

    With Paper for Feet

    By Jennifer A. McGowan

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Drawing together Jennifer A. McGowan's poetry of myth and folktale, and the frailties – human or otherwise – behind them, With Paper for Feet explores, mostly from a female perspective, the guts it takes to live or – often – die, un-heroically. Her characters laugh, argue, complain, suffer,

    curse.

    ...Gold is heavy,

    and chafes....

    aware that more is expected of them, but unwilling to play up.

    Praise for Jennifer A. McGowan's work

    ...gritty thought; wit; striking candour – an unafraid recognition

    of life's richness and desolation; memorable detail; all these are

    underpinned by a graceful, subtle, quite lovely way with language.

    Kevin Crossley-Holland

    ...bedecked with wit, irony, bittersweet folly and dictional-shifts

    jazzy enough to make a reader dance. Gray Jacobik

    ... precise, observant and deep into mythology.

    Claribel Alegría
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArachne Press
    Release dateApr 3, 2020
    ISBN9781913665081
    With Paper for Feet
    Author

    Jennifer A. McGowan

    Jennifer A. McGowan lives in Oxford. Despite being certified as disabled with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome at age 16, she became a semi-professional mime artist and performed until the disability became too much. Recently she has worked as researcher, editor, and writer for a UK company in 'devil’s advocacy'. She has taught both under- and postgraduates at several universities, across English, history, and heritage studies. Jennifer’s first full collection 'With Paper for Feet' was published by in 2017, and her follow up HOw to be a Tarot Card (Or a Teenager) in 2021 She has poems in Arachne anthologies 'The Other Side of Sleep' and 'No Spider Harmed in the Making of this Book'. Jennifer’s poems have also appeared in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Connecticut Review, Gargoyle, Storm Cellar, Envoi, Acumen, and Agenda; her chapbooks, 'Life in Captivity' and 'Sounding' are available from Finishing Line Press. Her work has been anthologized in 'Birchsong' (Blue Line Press, 2012), 'A Moment of Change' (Aqueduct Press, 2012), and Arachne Press’ 'The Other Side of Sleep'. Her songs have been recorded on several labels.

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      Book preview

      With Paper for Feet - Jennifer A. McGowan

      SECTION ONE

      WHITE WOMAN WALKS ACROSS CHINA WITH PAPER FOR FEET

      Each night, the same approach to a different small house: Qĭng nĭ, yī diăn diăn fàn, diăn diăn shuĭ. Wù yào chī fàn.Please, a little rice, a little water.  I need to eat.  Duō xiè.Thank you.  The right words coming out of my waì guó rén mouth.

      Each night, setting up a bivvy against the wind, lighting  a small light, writing in my journal stories, memories, forgotten names.

      Sometimes I’d get lost in words, stay two or three days. Children would approach:  Nĭ weìshĕnme găo cĭ a?  Why do you do this?

      I’d reply Wŏ de mŭ qīn chūmò wŏ, My mother haunts me,  and they’d nod.

      The brave would act out my need for a shrine.  Sometimes where I camped, I’d leave paper ribbons, small piles of stone.  Paper was the only thing to get heavier, not lighter, with use.  My words, my attempt to find my mother’s birthscape, how or if I could fit into it: heavy.

      Yet for all my vocabulary I could not talk, could not trade words, despite having paper for feet.

      Could not send my words home, for I didn’t know where,

      and what parcel box could fit all of me?  Nine months of wandering, soaking my feet in flooded fields, pressing pulp to new paper, bleeding ink.  White woman alone, her Chinese half never showing.

      Finally at the foot of an anonymous hill my mother drifted in

      with the mist.  Qĭng nĭ, māmā, gĕi wŏ yī diăn diăn fàn.

      Please, mother, give me something to live on. I could not see her face, but before she dissolved she spoke my name.

      THE TALKING SKULL

      adapted from a Nigerian folktale

      A hunter

      in search of food for his family

      walked and walked

      but found no prey.

      The plains stretched on

      and the sun beat

      and he was weary.

      There was one tree

      that stretched its branches

      and he sat beneath it.

      Propped his feet

      on a white rock

      and drank.

      When he was rested, he noticed

      the rock had two eye-holes

      and teeth.  Alone

      in the vast expanse

      except for the sky,

      he addressed the rock

      in a casual fashion:

      ‘What brought you here, my friend?’

      Then he laughed,

      grateful no one could hear him.

      So perhaps it is to be forgiven

      if the hunter jumped

      when the skull fixed him

      in its empty gaze and said,

      ‘Talking brought me here!’

      Food and family forgotten,

      the hunter ran to the king

      to tell him of this wonder

      and the king

      and all his attendants

      went in stately fashion

      to see the talking skull.

      The plains stretched on

      and the sun beat

      so it is perhaps to be forgiven

      if the king was weary

      and rather hot and bothered

      when at last they reached the one tree

      that stretched its branches.

      The king ordered the hunter

      to show him the wonder

      and the hunter found the skull

      and addressed it in a friendly fashion:

      ‘Greetings again!  Please tell my king–

      what brought you here?’

      But the skull

      was silent.

      For a long time

      the hunter pleaded and implored

      questioned and queried

      but the skull

      might well have been

      a white rock to prop his feet on

      for

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