Two Poems by Emma Harding

Jar Room Chorus

Here is your collective gut –
all your lost, upended tadpoles

blue-dyed colons, duodenums,
your calloused liver in quarters

foetuses with mermaid stumps,
stoned gallbladders and cystic kidneys.

If moved, they press against the glass
cajole you to unstopper them

reach down into the yellow flux
and grasp at their glacé sleekness.

At night when all fluorescents
flicker off, the last lab-coat

leaves the building, they slow
trapeze towards each other,

the passions of their former hosts
outworn as choler, spleen and bile,

but still solicitous they ask
And how do you feel about that?

Waltzers

Hollywood, I think it must have been.
No, not that one, I mean
the one between Highters Heath
and Wythall, the slide and give

of grass flattened to Midland mud
the fairground men in beanies
and the late afternoon dusk
hammered by Wham on the edge

of distort, the screams of girls
and the air slicked with burger fat,
sweat-scent of beer, on our palms
the coconut of helter-skelter mats.

The eldest and wanting to be brave,
drawn by the rainbow lights,
the ballerina sound of the name,
we take our seats beneath the bar

bogey of candyfloss on my upper lip
as a tattooed man, spry on the up-
and-down boards, takes our coin
and the engine wheezes into motion.

And at first it’s just about all right
but then faster and faster, too fast
and a dragoned hand birls our car
into mad pirouette and I cling

to the metal bar, each vein tight
with acid terror for it is too much
Make it stop, Daddy, make it stop
and my father laughing at my faith

in him to fix it, the impossibility
of changing anything now.
For we have given our lives over
to the music and the machine

to the goat-man who leaps through
the spinning, shrieking cups.
For I know now there are things
my father can’t hold me from –

the lights and the screams and the risk
the need to taste the beer and the floss.
For the fear. For the whole electric waltz.
For the not wanting it to stop.

Emma Harding’s poems have been published in various magazines and anthologies including The Poetry Review, Stand, The North, and Magma. Her debut novel, The Berliners, was published by John Murray in 2022. She’s currently working on a second novel. By day, she makes radio programmes, working as Editor for Drama, Arts and Classical Music for BBC Audio Wales and the West of England.