S A R A H  R O B E R T S

“ ‘PANDICULATE’

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She said, as we stood here between the steels trying to comprehend the labyrinth

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S             t           r           e        t               c       h                   o           u          t 

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I think of myself a wet gullet, tasting at the back of a throat. Oozing around the corners taking it all in and down to my vacuous belly. I am streaking up walls that are closing in on them selves.

 

With food strangely on my mind- morsels - I see the bank vault and open it into the fridge freezer partitioned doors of the Aberystwyth Iceland. Creaking open and closed and filled with prawn ring pinks and salmon rolls and crab sticks, too much salt and no precious stones.

 

As she walks down round and into the space, she doesn’t know yet its her moves that make that sense of ‘corridor’- ‘those ones’ of hers move through it – LIMBS- limbering, clambering.  As of yet, she doesn’t know what ‘they’  [the plastic versions] will do. Caught between these ones and those ones she turns in a circle, and considers with her eyes instead.

 

We measure with bodies.  At least 10 stretched wide apart in here, across, and 3 up.

I’m thinking of carcasses again whenever I see those vaults and Iceland fridges.   Conjuring images of trapped insides in the insides, locked up, sealed in, STUCK tight, airtight. Her ones may be full of air, sealed in and dancing to it.  And her ones will suck lemons and nipples in the next aisle- delectations. Like Dolly Parton on citrus with a cool breeze.

 

I took slippery trips to mines, in Corris and Abergynolwyn, this Christmas, falling over and cutting hot flesh on wet iced floors to keep it real and acrid. Bellied black insides and slate spilling out of mouths on hillsides -Lllechwedd- broken up into aggregate parts

 

If they were mouths, they’d rip and bleed on these sharp stones like my blood capped bone filled knee.

Same on all sides and in- L L E C H W E D D, slate.

 

The slate is ground into aggregate.  Stacked up debris, piled on, seaweed spewed up like chips and curry sauce and yesterdays blancmange all made the coloured pink of a bygone tandoori with the smooth cleft edges of splintered bone. Insides out.

In Abergynolwyn [MOUTH of the Olwyn], the slate has been sliced and slicked into an assemblage of roofs. Pink renders sit underneath like turned clay pots under lids, or fleshy dense women wearing hats before church.

 

The sun sets somewhere west of the M6, and this pinc/pink spreads relentlessly until the twmpath is a mound with pubic hair – HUMP, and the large blocks are gashed into, and the whole place is this stretchy body, all sinew and sex and earth and surface. “