Gaynor Clements
Biography
Gaynor is the founder of the Cambridge Writing Retreat. Her work has appeared in Mslexia, The Fenland Reed and she was recently the featured poet in Orbis literary journal. She has been highly commended in the Ledbury Poetry Competition, and long listed for the Bridport Poetry Prize and The Rialto Nature Poetry Competition.
She fell in love with Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott aged 11, boring the other kids rigid by reciting it at playtime. She’s beginning to understand the importance of Wordsworth and Coleridge, having been turned off all Romantic poets while studying them at University. She thinks Mark Doty is a genius, loves Sylvia Plath, Louise Gluck and many other contemporary poets too numerous to mention. Her poem today looks at the complex absent father/daughter relationship.
The Poem
You’re Never More Than Six Feet From An Elvis Impersonator
They are everywhere. On horsehair settees with grey antimacassars,
eyes like lasers on long beam, searching for you.
Lip curled, they throng your periphery, slick with Brylcreem
and fakery. They steal chickens not hearts, and you find them
on doorsteps ripping feathers like piss-a-bed clocks. They might, if you ask,
pluck the half-formed egg from the innards, which you hoard in a box until it rots.
Bony hips swinging, they carouse down the street to their own LA,
throwing tanners at kids in their slipstream. Pied Piper turned vermin.
They might tap the mike: ‘one-two-one-two,’ and sing Scarlet Ribbons,
a coil of entreaty expelled on a swell of John Smiths, but always come home
With teeth intact and refuse to be cornered. Don’t tackle them;
they bite Adam’s apples to stop you screaming or saying your prayers.