Poem
Fiona Benson
Haruspex
Haruspex
Haruspex
October and the blownmushroom dissolves,
its volva clubbed,
its stalk and cap,
its singed and musky gills.
I’ve spent too long collapsed
over this inwards dark
disembowelled, gone
to ground, fingering
my own wet spills
and bodily secretions,
a dream in which
I am fucking and weeping –
my mind has been wrong
for a long long time.
Here is its fruit.
It’s true,
I hear voices
and talk to myself.
I am done with shame.
© 2018, Fiona Benson
Fiona Benson
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1978)
The uncompromising beauty of Fiona Benson’s poetry has won her many awards and the admiration of readers. Just as her work appears on p!, her second book Vertigo & Ghost (Cape) has been awarded the £10,000 Forward Prize. It had previously garnered the Poetry Book Society’s 2019 Spring Wild Card, and the 2019 Roehampton Prize. Bright Travellers, published by Jonathan Cape in 2014, won the Seamus...
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Poems of Fiona Benson
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Haruspex
October and the blownmushroom dissolves,
its volva clubbed,
its stalk and cap,
its singed and musky gills.
I’ve spent too long collapsed
over this inwards dark
disembowelled, gone
to ground, fingering
my own wet spills
and bodily secretions,
a dream in which
I am fucking and weeping –
my mind has been wrong
for a long long time.
Here is its fruit.
It’s true,
I hear voices
and talk to myself.
I am done with shame.
Haruspex
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