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the poet
Hilary Menos won The 2010 Forward Prize for Best First Collection with Berg, and was a winner in The Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition 2019/20 with her pamphlet Human Tissue. Her second collection is Red Devon, while her most recent pamphlet is Fear of Forks. After reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, Hilary took an MA in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. She's worked as a student organiser, journalist, food reviewer, organic farmer, dramaturge and builder’s mate, is married with four sons, and now lives in France. Hilary is the editor of weekly online poetry journal, The Friday Poem.
the poems
Ivory Viking Queen
The Lewis chessmen are a group of medieval chess pieces carved from
walrus ivory and whale teeth, discovered in 1831 in the Outer Hebrides.
There is some debate over their origin.
What has she seen, what has she seen,
this sombre little Viking queen,
hunched and brooding on her ivory throne,
one hand to her cheek, one clutching a drinking horn.
Is she mourning the battle-dead, the lost pawns,
the cost of revenge, the endless cycle of harm?
Beside her, the king is implacable, bearded.
Her berserker is biting his shield.
There is mystery, too, in her making —
was she carved in the workshops of Trondheim or Jelling,
or by Margret the Adroit, the best in Iceland
with tusk and tooth and bone? From the cast resin face
of this British Museum fridge magnet
her maker winks at me. My money’s on Margret.
Queen Esther’s Makeover
' ... Esther was brought also unto the king’s house,
to the custody of Hegai, keeper of the women.'
~ Esther, 2:8 ~
The verb form used is passive:
they were gathered, they were prepared, they were made ready,
and after a twelve-month beauty treatment —
six months with oil of myrrh, six months with sweet perfumes
(of all the Biblical oils, myrrh is top of the list) —
each one was taken in to the bachelor king
and would not be taken in again, unless he delighted in her
and summoned her again by name.
The words for ‘beauty treatment’ translate as ‘scour, polish’
(read more here about skin care in the Bible,
Psalms, 104:15. Oil makes a person’s face shine.
Vigorous scrubbing with ash imparts a natural glow.)
But no mention of what happened to the other queen,
the one who refused, who spoke back, using the active voice.
Ruby Woo
All I ever needed to know about lipstick
I learned from Emily Fox. Influencer, queen
of the haul and swatch, she has fifty shades of MAC
and she’s applying them, now, on her YouTube channel,
working her way through the nudes, the pinks, the corals
like a pedagogue, like a pro, as if she’d been
gifted a Girl’s World Styling Head at birth.
She slicks on Daddy’s Girl, then Sin, then Ruby Woo
and I can’t stop watching, transfixed by her technique
(two notches on her top lip, then four elegant strokes)
and by the way she turns to camera when she’s done
and smiles, and pauses. Smiles wider. Main beam!
Emily taught me the power of a wet, red mouth.
Now crowds of men in pubs part like the Red Sea
and a dozen barmen fall over each other to serve me.
O Emily, what goes on when the camera goes off?
Do your cheek muscles ache? Does your fridge magnet say:
‘Lipstick is the red badge of courage’ — Man Ray?
I’m more of a John Keats fan. Beauty is truth,
truth, beauty. That’s all you know on earth,
all you need to know. Don’t ask me what I know.
I’m coming to a bar near you, coming for you.
Me and Daddy’s Girl and Sin and Ruby Woo.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb