Titania

By Katie Hale

Some days, I still feel the weight of the beast:

half-moon hoof-print bruises on my skin,

each touch the rough scrape of hair, rank fur

of belly, sick sweet rot of straw. Some days

when Oberon pours my drink, a double, he says

take it easy though, hey? his eye a wine-dark glint.

He calls me queen. He calls me foolish dawn,

teaches the boy to scoff at the stink of farm.

Where do you go when your body forces you out?

My husband’s breath is stable-dark, his hand

the bright electric of a fence. Some nights, my head

is full of bluebottles, a hideous swarm. Above the bed,

the ceiling light flickers like laughter, curtains

I don’t remember choosing

swish in the half-light like a tail.

*

Nights, I wake in the forest –

filth of mud and roots, mulch of the trees’

undressing. To sleepwalk, Oberon says,

is to doubt your own mind,

as he fixes new locks to doors, invents

fresh hiding places for the keys.

Dreaming, I always find them.

Dreaming, I lug this desire

down dirt tracks, through scrub and briar

to clearings that smell of nights before –

necked bottles on the floor,

knotted condoms, cigarettes

a spat scattering of stars. Each time

before I wake there, muddy-hemmed,

before I drag my body back

to too-clean sheets and Oberon’s bed,

I dream of cobwebs, seeds

caught and waiting, blossom

drifting on the air, and – yes – the tenderness

of fur, and yes, those listening ears.

*

Some days, it’s enough

to walk the long way home from the school run

past the animal sanctuary with its spread green paddocks

and know I’m wearing nothing

but gold lamé knickers

and a coat –

or some days, while I hoover, to hum

Little Donkey to myself, or open the windows,

hee and haw for all the neighbours to hear –

or afternoons, to watch Shrek naked

with the sound low, to touch myself in all

the appropriate places.

One night, the boy asleep under a fret of plastic stars,

I take Oberon out into the garden,

all slug-track and spider and midge, all muck

of freshly watered beds –

say, I want to ride you like a beast.

He laughs. He frowns. He tries to laugh again.

Fair to say he’s fairly lost for words.

Stretch my ears to hear him. Nothing.

Bristle against him, wanting. – Oh Oberon,

what visions have I seen…

Among the peonies, all blousy judgment,

the shocked petunias in shocking pink,

among the lupins’ vapid yellow fire, I stamp out

space for my body –

its brawn,

its braying,

its tart

dependable desire.

Katie Hale won a Northern Debut Award for her poetry collection, White Ghosts, and is the author of a novel, My Name is Monster, and two poetry pamphlets. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, Munster Chapbook Prize, and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Katie also runs Dove Cottage Young Poets for Wordsworth Grasmere, and is a Core Team Member of the Writing Squad. In 2022, she won the Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction to work on her second novel.

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