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A Categorical List of Every Butcher In Greater London libby wachtler
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4 Kilo 39 Goldhawk Road W12 8QP If I wanted to get heavier, I would think of you, and put on heavier boots. I was weighing you out – soft, like flour, precise and useful. I was measuring you by weight. I get up early to ruin myself along the edge of the canal, And test each muscle, one by one. I rise in the dark, Get warm on the Roman Road, Head east. Darling, auscultate! Deep in the thick web of me, Dense & sloppy & circling out – you hear it. In Boundary Gardens I slow, and pause, and carry you, And press your head to my heart. Darling, if I wanted to get heavier, I would think of you and put on heavier boots.
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Manor Farm 69 Victoria Road HA4 9BH I have never fainted because I am stronger than myself. A dog Tied to a man With a rope around the middle of him Jumps up to kiss Kristian on the apple And runs away. I drink wine before midnight and long for your jaw, long for the long jaw As K chops cabbage on the other side of the room on a Wednesday evening. I can feel it in my temple. In my elbow. In the ink & the glass. It infuriates me to think that you get to continue to have a life outside. Outside of the white Saturn, where I don’t yell because I feel so tender & dry. Outside of the skyline, in the woods. Wyoming on me, stillWyoming & sulphur on the soles of my shoes. (You held my hand at the paint pots.) You, in the Smokies, where I can’t follow, Where you dip & tell the same stories over and over, Where I’m not drenched in honey at seven o’clock sunset back behind the Tobacco Roots.
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Prime Cut 101 Bruce Grove N17 6UZ I was trying to butterfly the underside of my belly, I was sharpening the backs of my thighs against the bank of the canal. I was shocked by the rough red flesh and the meat of me: eyes closed, shot through from the bottom up and out, the bloom of soft capsaicin ringing out and up across and into the dark flesh of my chest, the sweet whales’ flesh in the centre of me. In the middle of the night my eyes open into the back of my head and gaze into the savoury cavern there, the glutamate alight and aching in your bed. I would suck the marrow out of my own bones. Making eyes at you, making eyes at you in the dark in the middle of the night on a Wednesday. I would suck the marrow out of my own bones, and sharpen the cleaver on my teeth. I wondered what it was you thought you might have seen inside my belly – wondered how exactly you’d ripped through barehanded and drunk. I was hot on Dante and only had his words – so tangled, and rough, and savage, that thinking of it now I feel the old fear burning. I burn and char and roast, where your hand left prints, where I knocked myself against myself and ended up split in two and tender. How tender- how tender flesh made soft can pool below you. How tender- you run up Mare Street from the south to get to me- to get to me, wrapped in layer after dripping layer of thick wool.
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Ash’s 133 Rye Lane SE15 4ST On Sunday mornings I am waiting to practice burying you. I am stuck inside my skeleton while having lost it years ago: my lungs are a source of concern, and I tuck you gently into the ground – under the sod – under the duvet in my warm bed on a cold morning. I wanted to take you to the heath in the summer. I wanted to show you how to disappear into the cold water, head first and growling and soft. I woke you up to remind myself that your body was full of blood and bones and sinew and mud, and slept & woke and slept & woke a thousand times against you to prove that I was still alive even though I wasn’t. I have a friend who lets me kiss him when he’s tired. He lets me practice my own death. It’s a solemn ritual in which I close my body up inside my body and soften my bones and get rid of them, one by one.
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Cleavers 4 Battersea Rise SW11 1ED We press our foreheads together and close our eyes. In Hackney I’ve known a devil -- in Balham I keep him close. I know where to push. At your temple. I know to crack it, an egg, a broken heart. A soft lobe. I know the tendon, stretched and coming apart. I know the ache in your delicate myelin for the west - to face west - to turn west & close your eyes. In gentle palm I hold what I can for you: the back of your skull. Cherrytree Heathway RM10 8RE Where the cerebellar folia rise up above spine to bloom across the inside of the skull in arbor vitae, pink and grey, and laid upon the table (and lit up every time I think to say your name.) I waited for spring. I waited for spring for longer than I thought I could: cold glia longing to be warm. I would have taken you home with me, soft glossal folds and all. Flock & Herd 155 Bellenden Road SE15 4DH I was thinking about calling out for my sister, whose moon gets full from the wrong direction, but who loves me, even though she wakes up when I’m sleeping. Sweet sister: we share our shins, our hamstrings, the flat and delicate surfaces of the topsides of our feet. From the same pool we draw our ligaments, intercostals, sinew and sweat. It’s
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your soft arch I flatten in shoes you bought on mornings you leave behind for me on roads you’ve already run down and made smooth. I was thinking of calling out for my sister, whose moon gets full from the wrong direction, and who loves me from afar. I was thinking of all the things we share because we were given them: the broad shoulder, the slender wrist. The tops of our feet and the dry palms of our hands. Our muscle slope and ponder and our howling and our howling and our howling. I was thinking about all the giving she’s done to those she gave: strong arms and quick flush and pierced and piercing tongue. I was enthralled and missing her: missing the running on the hill above the red house in a summer we could share. I lost my summer to winter and she tightened her grip or tried to in the heat – but I was so cold, and everyone kept slipping past me like cold offal on steel and they wouldn’t stop making me sad. I was thinking of my sister whose moon gets full from the wrong direction. How our bodies fill and empty – tides – how our bodies get full and empty and break: broken hearts spanning oceans for each other and relentless ache of flesh I know we both belong to. Borrowed. Borrowed bodies. We anchor our hearts in the dry valley, and long for it diametrically opposed, almost, our hearts in verse. Sister, your moon gets full from the wrong direction.
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Drings 22 Royal Hill SE10 8RT K and I walked to Greenwich and back, to fight the Fear, to look at the fear from the top of the hill by the meridian. He showed me how to go under the water of the river. How to spiral down beneath the riverbed where, later, on another day and with a different motive, I will refuse to be kissed. K leads me to the south and up the hill & I’m tired but happy to recognise it — to see myself in the bodies of children who are wild and whole on the grass. I am remembering my own small life. School trips, picnics, Greenwich on a Sunday with my dad. Cannon & Cannon 18 Market Row SW9 8LD At the Star my heart deflates like risen dough slashed with a sharp knife at the last minute. I am ambushed by myself, slumped back in my chair and unrecognisable. I half expect us to come to blows. How sorry I suddenly am. How far away. How it’s never a good idea to leave the house at night. How little I have to give him. How I take in my hands what he offers. How I hold it so tender, like a liver, or a fluke. Frictionless—now, alas, dead.
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Hook & Cleaver 140 South Ealing Road W5 4QJ Three weeks in your heart keeps breaking. Your heart is still broken, continues to rend itself, slip and shred and rift on rib. Heavy, leaden, but drippy and soft and leaking gore: your broken heart as you lay your head down, your broken heart at Bank and at Holborn and at Tottenham Court Road. Your broken heart breaking. You, breaking your broken heart. Cracking it, egg of muscle, on the south bank. Cracking it, bloody egg into the Thames. I miss the sound a baseball makes as it breaks the bat. I miss the bay, the grey surface of the water, Mt. Sutro (disembodied boat) rearing up in the fog. I miss beer in tall glasses, ERIC laughing behind the bar, and I miss cigarettes on Fell, looking him in the eyes. I miss that Achilles tendon. I miss the electrical wire, and the blue hard hats, and the fog horn. Tonight I miss the fog horn most of all. I would do anything to ride my bicycle to the lake. I would smother myself with my bare hands to hear your voice. I would suck on the joints in your shoulder and make you call my name out underwater. You, not talking: I’m listening through your ribs to your blood. I’m untethered and heavy. A hand with three fingers up inside my sternum: lifting up and out and hunched. Just off the floor, my feet, my tired feet.
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Zenith Halal 26 High Street CR7 8LE I picked up a package of figs in the grocery store before coming home and I almost cried. I can’t remember why. A woman looked me in the eye and told me she’d never eaten a pear before. That didn’t make me sad, it just made everything feel useless. “I don’t eat fruit.” It must be so tiring to be someone who doesn’t eat fruit. It just must be so exhausting to be someone who Doesn’t Do something. I wanted to tell her, I believe that you can live a limitless life, and then take my heart out of my body and set it on fire. Instead I just laughed like I felt weightless and very conspicuously zipped myself up into myself. Sometimes I think E is being an animal outside my window. Because I trust her. In the morning on the underground I got a mouthful of a familiar perfume. Then I was thinking about how, if Sweet isn’t tied up in Sugar, then I don’t think I’m experiencing the world correctly. Somewhere there was a sign for Gum Takes Tooth and maybe my brain just moves too slow for this place. Or maybe I’m right and there is electricity inside me still. It rained during our lunch break and I just needed a hug so badly. I pressed myself against the door of the train. I knocked my head on the door of the train. I just ached next to do the door of the train. When I got home I really did think I’d have to lie on the floor for a while. But K was there so I didn’t.
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Jack O’Shea’s 11 Montpelier Street SW7 1EX How I have to slam my hands palm-down and open on the cool brass of the bar to get your attention – meet me there this Saturday night when I’ve lost my voice and stopped looking. When I’ve yelled it out and rasp. When I talk with the curve of my spine and lie to you with it, over bourbon, leaking salt. Oh my spine: curl west and ache and long to be touched by gentle tip of finger. Oh, my spine: drunk and sloppy on a dance floor sticky with sweat. I lay my bare hands topsides up on the bar and can’t listen to the hot rise of sweat on the back of your neck. I am drunk and you are asking me to sing. I am drunk and we are pretending not to notice each other. Where I am yelling and flushed and not seeing, cold cackling back into my own broken body and needing to be taken home to cool down and warm a bed.
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Seagraves 228 High Road NW10 2SD I was still worried about the American rowers – lost – left for dead but reading poetry, alternately, and trading sleep. I haven’t seen the ocean since June and I worry about her every day. I run on the water and think about how badly I need you. Salt, and spray, and rock. I was missing Land’s End. I was missing the end of the land. I run on the water and miss the salt. I’m stronger at sea, and saturated, easy, my heart, thick-blooded and glossy and clean. I’m not cold enough for the Atlantic. I’m not sorry enough for the Irish Sea. I was still worried about the way the water looked beneath me. But I hadn’t seen the viscera growing thick, hadn’t done enough with my muscles yet. I was windswept and lonely. My hands were cold. I was still worrying. I wanted to make a tiny boat for you, of folded paper, and a single beating heart, and set it alight at dusk on a Tuesday. But I haven’t seen the ocean since June and the only heart I have I keep meaty and beating in the cavity of my chest. I only had the rush of water falling out of and into the locks, again and again, before sunrise on Saturday, when you’d promised to meet me but were too sad to do it. I would have tied the boat to me with, web & knot of twine. I would have braided it into my hair: long locks and myelin and string. I wanted to show you how to pull the silt through your teeth like an old man. I wanted to bathe you in salt. I would have
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swum to meet you, cold and chattering, at the far bank to the south, trying but not quite managing to grasp what it is, exactly, I am trying to say. A Dove & Son 32 Atlantic Road SW11 6PJ I was just daydreaming about you. I wish I could give you London. I wish I could bottle it and send it your way. The smell of it. The Star, the whiskey, the rain hitting the pavement on a Sunday. Me, unwashed in these unwashed sheets. I wish I could give you London. The mice playing on the kitchen floor, the river, the glow on the windows to the east. I wish I could give you lying awake and the mildew smell and the Anais Ninn on the bookshelf. I wish I could explain all the dreams I’ve been having, all the dreams in which my hands touch yours. All the dreams where you’re up in the trees. All the dreams where you come to me and open your face.I finished (am finishing) the bourbon from the big bottle and I am missing you. Sometimes I am grateful for the waxing moon and sometimes it makes me so sad. Sometimes I long for the long wane. I wanted to look at your face, I wanted to hear your voice, I wanted to remember both of those things like they lived inside of me, inside of my body, against the soft walls of my flesh. I wanted how real that felt, how warm, your hands at four in the morning, facing north.
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