“ALIEN” by Francesca Beard
Poster art/Illustrated Poem
“Alien” by Francesca Beard, one of the authors in Speaking Volumes anthology entitled Not Quite Right for Us, which celebrates their ten-year anniversary, and presented with a digital tour of the book.
Francesca will sent a film of her reading her poem, and this illustration was used to visually represent her words.
“ALIEN’ by Francesca Beard
Host: the organism in or on which a parasite lives
You emerge on Earth a human child
Trees rattle ancestral branches
Water otters round your trunk
Light streams colour
Amazement into wonder
You were made for each other
Elytra: first pair of wings, modified to form a hard shell
The crash of landing uproots
Who you are, the purpose of your mission
Colonising systems spawn in torn ground
Infesting mother tongues
Bumi Vēr Kē Pokok Alrubbishla
The island runs out of school
You fly to England where water is frigid
Learn to factor words into weapons
You’re in deep cover so long
You forget you’ve never known why
Hyaline: transparent, like glass
Skin fair as peeled almond
hair black as blood
east eye slanted west eye round
Which is the rightest?
Your face is open as the moon
common property
a mirror into which strangers stare
Nymph: sexually immature form usually similar to the adult
Your dad:
They warned us about the local girls
Men who could be your dad:
Where are you from?
Where are you really from?
You’re just like a girl I met in a bar in the war
Insingaporemanilaphuket
So young never guessed she was a pro
This exchange repeats until you accept
It was you in that bar, we are still at war
Cryptic: colouring and/or pattern adapted for the purpose of protection
Half-breed you’ve been gwailo chink-eyed mongrel mixed-raced
In and out of so many circles you’re fine with BAME
Though you get why anyone who actually belonged wouldn’t be
Inquiline: a creature that shares the home of another species without having any obvious effect
You’re a pro
Keep a bag half-packed
At home from home in no one’s land
Miscellaneous minority other
Navigating the foreign familiar
Sheltering anonymous under greige umbrellas
You could be anywhere
Not even you know who you are
Where you are going
Girdle: a strand of silk used to prop up the pupa
When your daughter ticks the ‘white’ box
Your hand wrings at your heart
like Olivia de Havilland in Gone with the Wind
‘But why? I am your mother’
Don’t leave me by myself again
You don’t say that out loud
Holometabola: complete transformation
Your genome migrates to another system
Coded in a body in the body of a craft
Astronauts unlatch; emerge onto pink moss
Release pulsing loops of pheromones
That call response from teeming ghosts
Which form, collapse, coalesce, unswallow
This planet’s sky in a breaking wave
Every atomised possible past and future you
Redeems a homing signal of exile and belonging
Abandonment is freedom
Promotional Illustration
Poster Art
Poetry
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