Note: These poems are from Cheapside Afterlife, a book-length sequence that reimagines the life of the 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton. At age 16, Chatterton invented the imaginary persona of a 15th-century poet he named Thomas Rowley and tried to pass off the poems as the work of a previously unknown priest to the literati of London. When that and other attempts to help his mother and sister out of poverty failed, at age 17 he committed suicide.
By St George’s Hill
Having lost the belief of youth that death
will let me pass, I stalk secrets
inside a senseless birth, a savory stuffed
with beef and scripture. In Mother’s
kitchen, knives like a feathered brigade
line the wall, a side of pork laid darkly
‘cross the planks—we’ve the shadow
of St George’s Hill to make
black pudding, thickened with a blood
of thanks. My morning hungry for tomorrow,
I think what havoc I might spin for a mouldering
wheel of cheddar. How
to imagine a better day over a cockcrow
bowl of paste, then carry on toasting
2.
to our youth. We have nothing
but the finest, Tom. Just
yesterday I visited a friend’s farm, the choir
of milking machines calmed
the heifers—those aluminum angels labor
for nothing but our succor, our cream
white clothes, poured from a vat
of chemicals—no sheep
need shearing. And please, Tom, take
care to shoo them from the feed bins else
they chew until their stomachs burst. Whether your
world or this, our days are a simple
succotash—we’ll be remembered for
how we succumbed to what we didn’t say.
~
Essay on Knowledge
As a child I must have imagined the harlequin
sexton parading his midnight rounds, lamp
held high to hex anatomists’ moon-haunted
shovels shimmering with dew to light
my nightmare. When—after much grunting, they
exhumed us to be dissected
in the theatre of knowledge amongst the bleating
lambs of new science, what lesson of reason
could be mastered without tasting arsenic of the apple
seed? With what calculus did Leibnitz measure the variable
slope of suffering? How likely
what the stars portend above the cemetery where
Father lies and Newton might’ve staggered, over
wrought by a worm-riddled pippin?
~
At Colston Hospital School
Headmaster never wanders lest starlight scorch
the nave of his alluvial noggin. The genius of his
novices, each unique as a hospital
brick, instructs the purpose of our grand
brainery. Matins of the bum brushers teach
us to sleep, bind our scalps as if tonsured by
the firmament to unrelenting ignorance. Mumble-
mumps of prophets and bookkeepers, won’t we
schoolboys one day drift above bluebell
automatons of St John’s Burial Ground, pates shiny
as parchment upon which our lives
are etched with nails, of which we have no
say and accept what’s given, then without
asking erase our days behind?
~
Port of Call
Study close the articles of the Murder
Act—the menu of tiny human souls, unsteady
deckhands of Leviathan—the weather
of late gives naught
but refusal—clouds weave, wigless
as retiring lords. Larks lose themselves
in the air. At Customs House, a roundhead
slaver loads a case of gin
as comfort for the triangular
tour, staggers down the dock
to the Bristol Wharf Coach
& Horses Pub where accounts
settle, lumpy and reeking
of rancid beef in a canvas sack. Heed ye well.
~
Anatomy of the Soul
Exhausted from a day’s labor smudging
mistakes from encyclopedic ledgers, might
you miss it, transcendent in an alley
off Charing Cross, translucent in oil
light? Glassy organs flood with crystal
blood driven by heartache
but for the moon’s edge dulled
pink as a pig knuckle. Just shy
of the supernatural in a bedroom’s
last word, all flesh and every
item of furniture’s brought
back to the world by her painted
toes—love and blood of an inside
river burning all the way down.
~
George Rawlins has recent poems in The Common, New Critique (UK), Mudfish, Nine Mile, Pennsylvania English, Plainsongs, Sanskrit, and Spinning Jenny. He has a BA from Ohio University, attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for a year, and earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He lives in California and works in the Silicon Valley. The book Cheapside Afterlife is forthcoming in April 2021 from Longleaf Press at Methodist University.