Fucking in Cornwall
by Ella Frears
The rain is thick and there’s half a rainbow
over the damp beach; just put your hand up my top.
I’ve walked around that local museum a hundred times
and I’ve decided that the tiny, stuffed dog,
labelled the smallest dog in the world, is a fake.
Kiss me in a pasty shop with all the ovens on.
I’ve held a warm, new egg on a farm and thought about fucking.
I’ve held a tiny green crab in the palm of my hand.
I’ve pulled my sleeve over my fingers and picked a nettle
and held it to a boy’s throat like a sword.
Unlace my shoes in that alley and lift me gently onto the bins.
The bright morning sun is coming and coming
and the holiday children have their yellow buckets ready.
Do you remember what it felt like to dig a hole all day
with a plastic spade just to watch it fill with sea?
I want it like that – like water feeling its way over
an edge. Like two bright-red anemones in a rock pool,
tentacles waving ecstatically.
Like the gorse has caught fire across the moors and you
are the ghost of a fisherman who always hated land.
From Shine, Darling. Reproduced with kind permission from Offord Road Books.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2019
Shine, Darling
Ella Frears
About Ella Frears
Ella Frears (b. 1991, Truro) has been poet-in-residence on the number 17 bus in Southampton, at Tate St. Ives, and in a university physics department, among others. She has written extensively about motorway service stations. These very different subject-matters find coherence in Frears’ idiosyncratic voice, sense of humour, and strange connection-making. Poetic form, for Frears, is unstable and shifty, a way of drawing different registers of language into unexpected collisions.
The heart of Shine, Darling is the unsettling long piece detailing an autobiographical near-abduction experience, ‘Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity’, where interwoven voices and shifting time-frames build up like evidence. ‘I wanted to write a long-form lyric poem the length and weight of a short story, with the suspense of a novel’, writes Frears.
Read reviews of Shine, Darling in The Guardian and by Martyn Crucefix.
Watch Ella Frears repurposing the visual language of the Online Make Up tutorial to talk about the work of Chinese poet Yu Yoyo.
