Tooth
by Martha Sprackland
Like a round grey stone lodged
in the fork of a tree
the tooth sits intractably
at the far back of the mouth
between the ear and the jaw.
The mouth can’t close fully,
like a freezer door;
can’t crank itself open
more than a few gear-teeth’s width,
enough for water through a straw.
At night it wakes up
like an eyeball, lolls sourly on the tongue
rolls against the drum
tampers with the hinge
and rubs it raw.
Nothing to do, between the shift-
change of the painkillers
but listen to my bedmate
breathing asleep and the foghorns
in the hot harbour.
All the world’s cameras
are on this clamorous point:
this knot, this bole, this clot,
this breaking news, this fire,
this prisoner of war,
a sealed world seething
like a black egg
incorruptible by amoxicillin
and saline wash.
I want it out.
I go down to the dockside,
oily between the cruise ships
and Maersk containers,
to gargle palmfuls of the sea
against the hard bezoar
and its faulty magic.
I idle towards
the half-bottle of whiskey,
the red-handled relief
in the kitchen drawer,
but Ed shifts and turns against me,
skin like cotton, outside the pain,
and says through sleep –
his clean sound mouth –
Honey, are you still sore?
I can’t answer
round the cobblestone,
the ship, the choke, the pliers,
the acorn cracked
and pushing through the floor.
From Citadel. Reproduced with kind permission from Pavilion Poetry.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2020
Citadel
Martha Sprackland
About Martha Sprackland
Martha Sprackland (b. 1988, Barnstaple) was six when she met her future publisher, Deryn Rees-Jones, at a poetry workshop for children in Sefton Park. (She wrote a poem about a mouse, on purple sugar-paper, with a felt-tip pen.) She works as poetry editor at Poetry London, and in 2017 she co-founded her own small press, Offord Road Books, and so is represented in this year’s shortlists in all three capacities – editor (of Fiona Benson), publisher (of Ella Frears) and poet.
The poems in Citadel enter into a dialogue with the sixteenth-century Queen of Spain, Juana de Castile. Sprackland, who spent a year teaching in Madrid, has described the book as ‘a rupture or portal in time, through which two women separated by hundreds of years could talk.’ Juana, often known as Juana la Loca, or ‘the mad’, spent most of her life imprisoned at Tordesillas, the ‘citadel’ which gives the book its title: ‘I wanted to create a different reality in which she could be written to, entertained by a sequence of letrillas, spoken to, kept company.’ Sprackland’s poems are simultaneously intimate and eerie, circling round motifs of teeth and blood and eggs.
Read reviews of Citadel in The Guardian, The Telegraph and by Martyn Crucefix.
