Chloe Elliott

An ANGEL IS A PAIN IN THE EYE

An angel is a pain in the eye.
An angel is unfortunate enough to feel
absolutely nothing at all. They can only
channel infrequencies. A two-headed calf
springs and then springs from itself again.

Claire protested there is too much furniture in this house.
I know all the shadows in this barn. A hat is neverending.
I cannot say it more plainly. I cannot heave the words
into my mouth the way she could. My mother, too, sat
in the dark that night and whispered to herself.
Playing the same tune, she asked for it to stop.

I sent her a photo of the cat and pretended
it belonged to someone. Good, she said,
I wouldn’t want you getting any diseases.
The truth is a trick and the trick is in the
table. A collection of space according to form.

Will you keep going when I ask you to stop?
I’ve been locked out of language long enough
to make a girl dizzy. I pronounce the sky and then
the ground. I think rosepetals, rhododendron, wax-
seed. The sheep make their way down the diagonal
bank as they dream of white, wet hydrangeas.

Chloe Elliott is a winner of the New Poets Prize as well as the Creative Future Writers’ Award. Her writing features in Aesthetica, bath magg, Basket, berlin lit, Corridor8,  Magma, The North, and Strix, amongst others. Her pamphlet Encyclopaedia was published by Smith|Doorstep and her microchapbook DREAMSIMULATION was published by The Braag. She sits on the board for The Writing Squad.

Chloe said this about her poem:

This poem emerged from a workshop prompt that saw nouns be mismatched with definitions. Like what is an eyelash? A pain in the eye. I can’t trace the original definitions, maybe a hall of mirrors was ‘neverending’ and I’ve lost the initial definitions for hat and angel. It sort of doesn't matter though. A lot of the poem came out of that gap between a thing and the language we have for it, like the people in the poem who can and can’t say things. The two-headed calf of course comes from the Laura Gilpin poem but also makes me think of driving around the North Yorkshire valleys. I’m always thinking about animals and what they dream about, like do they ever dream of us the way we do of them?