I S S U E 5

Elizabeth O’Connor

Stricken

I found the first between my ribs. It felt tender in the bath, the way water stings a new cut. When I pulled my body from the porcelain, two yellow eyes greeted me. A beak opened to a red tongue. I fed it a piece of soap and screamed. 

The owl lived happily for a while. It was content to live under clothes during the day, as it slept. I bought dead baby mice from the pet shop. I told myself they were jelly beans as I slid them beneath my shirt. 

The next owl was trouble. Two red lumps on my thigh. Hard, with a black centre. The muscles cramped into dark knots until two eyes pulled themselves open. This one wanted feeding every hour. 

By summer I had six. A pale face on my foot, boiled-sweet eyes. One grey and fluffy above my elbow, one bald and pink like a new limb. Some were just beaks—black, broken fingernails. In the night-time, my body vibrated. I was nauseous. I dreamt that I could fly.

The doctors tell me it is part of life’s rich tapestry. They tell me things about my body that I need to learn. I pull feathers from my neck in irritation. I have my own theories: water contamination, foetal twin syndrome, a bad dream.

I am woken when one emerges from me, standing at the foot of my bed like a lost child. Before I speak, it somersaults through the open window. In the morning I lie with my legs open, my mother hammering at the door.

I catch one in the mirror, in the pub toilets, when I raise my head from the sink. I see the door open and its tiny claw feet running clack, clack, clack. When I return, I have a thousand new eyes. They grow like amber beneath the trees, like insects from the ground.

When the last owl leaves, the feathers come. They grow on my chest, bright and slippery as fish. The taste of copper coats my tongue. When a man enters my room, I pull his guts as I once ate liquorice. The night pulls me in, fills the air between me, feels like a kind of strength.

Llandulas (Church on the River)

Sometimes you hear a river, a window 
of your city flat being open to the sun, 
the cars waning their own tide,
the radio and the high wheeling of the gulls. 
You hear her footsteps on the glass
like a millipede. The river sits
in her wooden chair at the window, her tights
bunched at the knee, her hands turning and turning
the Dulas pebble you brought back once. She has
a patina of ashes around her eyes, your grandmother’s
glassing.

As the light goes,
she fades to black mould on the wall 
and you dream
of the horses knee-deep in water, the nets billowing
like sails, and a line of red lanterns,
each one carried by a wet mouth.

Portrait of Eve as a Beachcomber

Here we do not learn to swim.
The boats say: even in the calm
the water furs your insides with
salt. Here, the smooth pebbles open 
to cockles, the jellyfish a plastic bag, the land
spittle of tiny mouths. I find a fish’s spine 
on the sand, the size and shape of a river.
I keep it. I keep the hair-wound weeds too,
the X-ray purse and its eggs. I know when a thing
arrives unwanted. The men on the harbour watch me
soundlessly. In the pub I arrive
at their table, my sleeves dripping. I tell them: 
I don’t think you could walk 
into a wave’s cathedral, see
a huge eel rise up in front of you
and feel nothing. They look back at me
with their mouths open, and I spit into
every one.

NOTE

On Ecotones and Edge Species

I’m drawn to the sea as a subject, particularly the ecotonal shore and what lives there. An ecotone is a transitional area from one ecosystem to another, such as a shore between land and sea, a salt marsh, reed beds. The organisms living on an ecotone are defined by their ability to live on this edge, belonging to both biological communities and neither.

In our contemporary age, the shore has become a site of crisis: the continuing rise of sea levels threatens coastal towns and low-lying archipelagos, as does, in a different way, the rise of second-home owners on marginalised coastal communities. We are more aware than ever of the piling up of plastics and other waste on the shore, of the shore as a place for the landing of displaced peoples, of its use in the construction of dangerous, insular national myths. As an ecotonal landscape, it is also a place of flux: we can’t measure Britain’s coastlines because they are always changing. This fluctuating edge quality opens up imaginative possibilities that might take place on shifting, mutable ground.

‘Portrait of Eve as a Beachcomber’ is heavily influenced by H.D.’s Trilogy, three long-form poems written in London during the Blitz. Trilogy is a poem about civilian trauma and ends on the messianic arrival of a female hybrid of Aphrodite, Mary, Isis, and Eve who emerges out of the sea. Playing on the Aphrodite origin myth and the semantic branching of Mary (mer/sea and mere/mother, marine), Trilogy’s shore also foregrounds human evolutionary beginnings at the site where living creatures first emerged from the water. It presents the shore as a place of cultural and ecological beginning, renewal, and balance between human and nonhuman worlds.

My grandmother came from the coast. In ‘Portrait of Eve as a Beachcomber’, I was also thinking about her stories of collecting objects along the beach, the way she would sell them or line them up with the small fossils her father found while working in the nearby limestone quarry; the way she would visit her uncle, a fisherman, and compare catches; the way no one in her village learnt to swim. Their experience of a shore landscape would be very different to mine; not theory or pleasure but work and familiarity gained through labour. It reminds me of the writing of John Gillis and his essay on ecotonal ‘edge’ people: there are those who live on the shore and those who live with it.

A few years ago, I went to my grandmother’s village for the first time and found her terraced fisherman’s cottage. It was up for sale and, when I got there, a couple from Surrey were viewing it. They were set on turning it into a holiday home they could rent out, on paving over my great-grandfather’s vegetable garden at the front of the house to construct an outdoor pizza oven. They made a joke about the outside toilet, how it might be marketed as ‘green’ and attract eco-tourists. On the train back, I started writing ‘Llanddulas’ about migrations, the memory of water, and the recurring dream my grandmother had of horses pulling fishing nets along the nearby river, identical to her childhood memories save for it being night-time.

The final poem, ‘Stricken’, is not explicitly littoral but founded on the same shaky ground of the ecotone, the sense of being neither one thing nor another. Again, I was thinking about evolution, albeit a very unscientific mix of reptilian feathers, owls, and rapid transformation. I was also thinking about my own body, my difficult relationship with it, its unruly surprises. The poem ends not on acceptance, or beauty, but on awesome terror.

Elizabeth O’Connor lives in Birmingham, holds a PhD in modernist poetry, and won the 2020 White Review Short Story Prize.

‘Stricken’, ‘Llandulas (Church on the River)’, and ‘Portrait of Eve as a Beachcomber’ appear in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of Poetry Birmingham; you can buy the issue here.