Clare Pollard

i Marionette means little Mary. Think of Mary Shelley, a jointed doll lifted from her mother’s unstitched interior, that fist-shaped hole, the future mother of three dead children and Frankenstein’s monstrous electric baby, hater of creators. Think of all the porn-dollies moving their mouths up and down on wood and the way the men jerk, responding as they’re made to, and the clear wires. The men who make up cyborgs, beautiful and silver-skulled with wet mouths that might deliver quick blue shocks. Think of Eve’s small teeth kinking apple flesh and who put it there and who suggested and who lifted her wrist. Think of shadow puppets with enormous penises. Think of little boys shot for holding up toy guns. Think of animals compared to puppets by Aristotle — how levers are released and strike the twisted sinews against one another. Think of people compared to animals. Think of men on a bus forcing instruments so far inside a girl they puppet the girl to death and puppet means pulled by tendons. Think of if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands. Think of the grace of a marionette as it glances the earth, as its limbs shake and float. Think of how its mind is elsewhere. ii Fox and Cat hang Pinocchio from the tree, a noose of string around his throat. Hoist by what he’s made of, the merciless weather swings him to clatter like a wedding bell that rings out atrocious spasms to a shuddered stop. His maker is not here for this unmaking. They should make him watch.

1 Sometimes I feel like Jonah fleeing Nineveh. Who wants to hear what is evil? Every day we make this earth less alive, various or legal. What is this diminishment but sin against god which is a program to generate complexity? I should go to Nineveh and cry against wickedness which halts love which wants the other’s different self to stay itself. 2 They say if you’re fair or moneyed or live on a mountain you won the lottery, everyone else, apologies — storms aren’t going away so play the game nicely. Lots are cast, blame allotted, men tossed to the ocean’s torsion, seaweed’s cage, foreclosing depths and then the blue whale’s curdled belly digesting everything we’ve done. 3 I visited a branch of Sea Life in an ex-county hall. Mops in corridors, half-empty vending machines. They took photos of us pretending to look scared in front of green screens. Rays took titbits from stinking cups. The sharks were gilled glide, ravenous for outside. We were vomited onto dry land by the Coca-Cola London Eye. 4 I must warn Nineveh. But who wants to hear me say what is evil? It is dominion. It is the law that makes goodness impossible, fasting in sackcloth the only option. But god will not say must only relent or sorrow as the whale does when her calf is taken — a harrowed sound that does not bear description.