VICTORIA FLETCHER
Second Prize - 2021 Tower Poetry Competition, 'The Key'
15 days in a cage with Charlotte Brontë
1.
Charlotte Brontë was born on the 21st
of April 1816. That made her an Aries,
like me. That made her headstrong.
Note that she was nearly a Taurus.
Make of that what you will.
2.
Charlotte Brontë – like me –
was insecure about her nose. She drew herself
weighed down by it. She was less than
five feet tall, and had little feet
and even littler shoes.
4.
Charlotte Brontë’s house is now a museum.
I have seen her shoes and clothes
stuffed up in a glass case. I have bought her heart
for five pounds in Waterstones and read her,
a dead bird splayed open in one hand.
7.
Charlotte Brontë, short-sighted, lived inside
her head, stepping out sometimes to drink
the watery light of the sun shining through clouds
on the moors. She was not a caged animal;
unlike her sisters, she did not rattle the bars
or bite at passers-by.
10.
Charlotte Brontë wrote a lot
about men with dark hair and darker,
brooding souls. Charlotte Brontë,
like central London, had bad taste in men.
Our astrological compatibility is bad,
but I’d like to put my tongue in her mouth,
show her how it’s done, and find the key
to freedom behind her tonsils.
13.
Charlotte Brontë poured her heart out
in letters. If she could have laid her hands
on their recipient, she would have kissed him,
then strangled him, stepped on his Belgian throat
and left him for dead.
15.
Charlotte Brontë knew how to do the worm.
Sometimes, when it all got too much for her,
she would lie down on the wooden floor
of her father’s parlour and undulate
like an ever-breaking wave.