The natural beauty of Lego

Broken bones, heaped, on the next chair.
In front, two fat lungs growling and full.
Sweat slides down the baubled face of the child
On the floor, playing manual labour with Lego.
Young Mr. and Mrs. Naïve, #blessed
Murmur a sweet prayer for the health
Of an embryo, their band aid future.
I shouldn’t be here now.
This fresh. This clean. This unlucky.
Bestowed upon me, one in three
Sitting patiently for no news is good news.
What I wouldn’t give for the fractured limbs.
Feathered lungs. Snot waterfalls. Bubbling womb.
Building blocks: green, blue, yellow and blue shapes
Integrate to produce the perfect specimen,
Pulled apart then built again.
A stable home. A royal bridge. A handsome, plastic palace.
That’s not me, I shouldn’t be here. But I am here.
Wishing, like Lego, I could start over.

 

 

Pulp Savannah

My man doesn’t believe in dinosaurs.
Why would the Lord wipe them out like that?
Is this before or after Adam and Eve?
Scoffs at the T-Rex’s tiny hands.
As if, he says.

I dig a coral fingernail into his perfect side
His skin unscarred, plastic, like the prosthetics
they use in hospital dramas.
I want to make a slit, to see clean, fake blood.
How can I worship a dinosaur-denier?

We’re watching a BBC documentary.
He throws his hands up, wild
All of them, disappeared? Poof!
in that thick treacled anabolic hum
Every single one of them?
Impossible.

I tell him, then, of the meteor
some sixty-six million years gone
that collided with the earth around
the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico,
the impact of which not only leaving
a great geological depression but
triggering a climate disruption so devastating
it ended in mass extinction.

Killing everything that lived? he asks.
Not all, I say. Approximately seventy-five per cent.
He rolls his eyes. And then humans magically appeared?

I tell him, then, of evolution.
From amoeba to chimp to cave man
the desire to survive propelling the betterment of species.
Our addiction to existing, each new generation anatomically determined to trump the last.
One more inch, a sharper tooth, a more agile, suspicious brain.

Can you prove it? he asks.
Can I prove evolution? I reply.
Yeah, he says.
I mean… I say.
You’re naïve, he says. Too easily led. Gullible.

He tells me, then, of his idea for a series of sex parties.
There’s money in Millennials humping each other
in public, he says. They’re braver, these days.
My man’s perfect. I want to eat him alive, like a Black Widow.

 

 

amy photoAmy Charlotte Kean is an advertising strategist, lecturer and writer from Essex. Her stories, rants, reviews and poems can be found on The Guardian, Disclaimer, Shots, Litro, Barren, Milk & Beans, Poetry Village and the Drum, amongst many others upcoming. She featured on Reflex Fiction’s Autumn 2018 longlist and was Ink, Sweat & Tears’ Poet of the Month in September 2018. Her first book, The Little Girl Who Gave Zero F*cks is out now, with Unbound. @keano81

Featured photo credit: Amanda Ollinik @Allunderonemoon