#vicki feaver

[phantomleaves]

Or prayers for the child  who spooned golden syrup  from the green lion tin, dribbling it  in spirals to form amber pools  in her porridge; who stole 

from her mother's purse  to buy red-tipped sugar cigarettes;  who ruined her teeth  on lollipops and seaside rock?  Prayers for the woman 

who still craves sweetness:  savouring strawberries dipped  in the sugar dish, gobbets  of crystallised ginger, figs  almost rotten with ripeness?

— Vicki Feaver, from ‘The God of Sugar’

[ma-pi-ma]

Casa è qui ora a questo tavolo di legno inciso e graffiato

dove sto sbucciando un’arancia – lo spruzzo della scorza mi fa

fremere il naso, e la buccia lucida cade in lunghe spirali.

È l’ora tranquilla alla fine del giorno: senza canto d’uccelli, né vento;

solo il ritmo del mio respiro e lo strappo leggero della pellicina che si stacca dalla polpa.

Vicki Feaver, Casa è qui, ora

[6peaches]

Vicki Feaver - Coat

Sometimes I have wanted to throw you off like a heavy coat.

Sometimes I have said you would not let me breathe or move.

But now that I am free to choose light clothes or none at all

I feel the cold and all the time I think how warm it used to be.

- Coat by Vicki Feaver

[pasdetrois]

- Vicki Feaver from The Handless Maiden

[silentscreampoets]

‘What do you do?’

a man asked me at a party.

‘What do you do in the afternoons?’

I was thirty-one:

the same age as Plath

when she turned on the gas.

‘I’m a poet!’ I lied

jolting myself to life:

a woman buried under ice

with words burning inside.

- excerpt from 1974 by Vicki Feaver

[virgin-martyr]

– my emptiness like the emptiness of a temple with the doors kicked in;

Vicki Feaver, excerpt from “Judith”

[carthavaru]

Sober now, you press against me a body that's had to unlearn the melt and burn that's in your blood.

Vicki Feaver, excerpt from “Ice and Coal”, in The Book of Blood

[phantomleaves]

I dug all night in the company of moths – drawn from the dark to the bright beam of my torch – recovering first his skull, last, the phalanges of his toes. Finally, at dawn, my bag full, I carried my husband home.

— Vicki Feaver, from ‘The Surgeon’s Widow’