Jessica Mookherjee

diseases of birds

I become air sac mite riddled, bite my lung addled,
in this too small cell. I grow stabs in my face, all peck
peck for the cigarettes, I killed two men for them,
for the choking, the guard thinks I’m joking. My spit
breathes through him. In stage one, I’m bird man.

Now feather falls and rot sweeps through us, canaries
gassed and shed in chunks, I become drab. It’s the order,
doctor’s orders, keep safe, locked down so I don’t spread
my beak-beady needs. I am dung covered pecking,
still alive, twitching through this shit they feed us.

It started with her egg binding, she liked my songs,
Help me, Bobby, help, she tweeted so I cut the cock
off the guy who beat her and stabbed him to death.
I watch sparrows fight, make chin check happen, flit
through my spirits, bring me worms, leaves, a fallen nest.

I am too much iron, stage two tin, I am metal caged,
a hot one in the cut they put me in and I never talk,
I never sing, slug weathered, beak smart and driven,
I scribe the birds’ secrets as they tell me their wrongs,
take flight of ducks, thugs and bugs. We’ll die in here.

the man

Half bull, wrong half, can’t say why he’s stuck
in the amazement, stuck dumb on the platform
he’s given. He is bidirectional, wrong half looks back,
What’s he looking at? Senses his arms but feels
the lock of being trapped. Poor beast. He’s a headache
from the roaring. He can’t hear himself think.
He doesn’t want to stand up or sit down, so lies
on the sofa watching a Scorsese film about Jesus. Waiting
for a hero to work it all out for him. She promised
the threads would make sense, but calls him a bit of an animal,
so he decides to take up knitting instead, that will show them,
decides to identify as Minotaur, to be hung for a bull
as a golden calf. He takes the dog for a walk, talksport
on his headphones, treads rose petals all over
the house as she tut tuts. Another fine mess on the landing.
We are all scared, he whispers as Theseus thrusts.

Jessica Mookherjee is a widely published poet of Bengali origin, brought up in Wales and now living in Kent. She has three full collections with Nine Arches Press. Her second collection, Tigress (Nine Arches Press, 2019), was shortlisted in the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Prize for best second collection. Her latest books are Notes from a Shipwreck (Nine Arches Press, 2022) and Desire Lines (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). 

Jessica wrote the following about :

I was inspired by stories of masculinity and how men and men’s bodies can be weaponised in films and myth. As I believe we contain all elements of nature (including sex and gender), my poems explore how words can turn us “animal”. Here, the Bird Man of Alcatraz becomes the thing he cherishes and suffers the injustice of being turned into an caged creature, exploring how we are also our environment. In the ‘The Man’, I’m fusing ‘Raging Bull’ ( film : Scorsese) with the Minotaur to show how we can all be caged and positioned by our gender — and how we are all much more complex then the social roles we are sometimes bound to play out.