Who Is Mary Sue? (Faber Poetry) - Softcover

Sophie Collins grew up in Bergen, North Holland, and now lives in Edinburgh. She is co-editor of tender, an online arts quarterly, and editor of Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016), an anthology of contemporary poetry translations. small white monkeys, a text on self-expression, self-help and shame, was published by Book Works in 2017 as part of a commissioned residency at Glasgow Women’s Library. Who Is Mary Sue? is her first poetry collection.

Dear No. 24601
The future is an eye that I don’t dare look into
Last night I dreamed I was a ball of fire
and woke up on the wrong side of the room
this is a recurring dream
I share an apartment with my twin sister
Enclosed is a photo of us on a tandem bike
I forget which one I am
Sometimes I wake up believing I am her
she is me
and there is nothing about the day to indicate otherwise
Weeks stack up this way
As a girl I did not do well with other children
Unable to see the fun in games
which were only ever maddening
I paid close attention to the weather
delighting in hail and not much else
save a prized collection of Hummel figurines
derived from the pastoral sketches
of Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel
German Franciscan nun and talented artist
Her simple peaceful works
drew the enduring hatred of Hitler himself
You know Hummel translates as ‘bumblebee’ in German
and they say she was always ‘buzzing around’
What do you think do we grow into our names
or does kismet know a thing
One name can mean too much
the other not nearly enough
The details make a difference
like sitting on the white cushion
as opposed to the blue
white is pure of course
but my soul’s been in the bargain bin since Russia
and Lenin’s tomb
I had a moment there
among the balustrades
and once that moment had expired
it graduated
from a moment to a life
Beauty Milk
I don’t matter.
I am a blemish,
a fragment,
an apartment.
I am a multiplication
and a made-up belief.
I am nothing for days afterwards.
They say ‘sum’ about me
because they believe I am expanding.
Really I’m too clean cut.
This one time I was owned
but he wouldn’t pay the charges
at the German border.
Russia is the pits.
Sister
Sister, listen to me – tonight our father will pull open the heavy door of our home, walk with his large boots into the kitchen and drop a pig on the table. In the morning, peasants with children and glassy-eyed babies will enter, sniffing at us like animals, noting the absence of a mother who lays out cold plates, white bread.
Healers
I encountered a scaffold
outside the Holy Trinity Church in Vladimir.
At first I didn’t notice her
slumped against the side of the church –
she was pretty small for a scaffold, pretty un-
assuming. Her safety mesh
was torn in places and sun-bleached all over
and threatened to dislodge
due to a forceful wind that was typical
of the season. She was shaking.
She was fundamentally insecure.
She told me that good foundations are essential
but the men who had put her together
hadn’t taken advantage of the right opportunities.
Now, each day, someone came by
called her ‘unsafe’ and also ‘a liability’
then left, failing to initiate the dismantling process
that yes would have been painful
and slow, but kinder.
International visitors to the church
blamed her for the mess of tools and rags
on the grounds and for the fact
that they could no longer see
the church’s celebrated mural
depicting Saint Artemy of Verkola
unusually pious
highly venerated
child saint killed by lightning.
His dead body radiated light
never showed signs of decay
and was in fact said to have effected
multiple miracles of healing.
I said comforting things to the scaffold
but she only seemed to lean more heavily
against the side of the church.
We are rarely independent structures she said
before she dropped a bolt pin
which released a long section of tube
which released another bolt pin
which released several wooden boards
which scraped another tube
and made an unbearable sound.