PRIN / CESS / PARK / MAN / OR

Gemma Barnett

I – cess

i’m listening to a podcast that recognises

everything as a construct. in that case i 

don’t know the origin of anything. a chain 

dropped into descending water proves all 

is traceable if you haul yourself toward it. 

maybe it’s a long time ago when the jails 

picked illness like a scabby knee when 

asylums came to take out the poor, beat 

them into submission like his front door 

last week, boot driving through the letter-

box. i wasn’t there but i hear wailing 

was thrown in a cell. i know bars cast 

stripes down wet faces, his eyes now 

holes made by extinguished cigarettes, 

remembering his brother’s body left in 

their house turned over. 

i mean to say: on Wednesday when they 

finally let him home, now alone, brother’s 

blood the carpet crust, the police stuck 

planks of wood across their own damage 

saying

  that’ll do

with the scum they let in

anyway

  on Thursday when we drove up to help 

  clean splintered needles, he asked me 

  for a tenner. i clutched my pocket searching

for the origin of punitive. 

II – Prin

my 13th birthday party was a dewy sleepover.

the glamourised teen movie fun turned horror when a thin girl’s 

mother asks if she’s taking her medication – refusal 

ends in multiple murders of good un-pilled girls. a shower 

curtain dragged underground. my fingers radicalised 

the beanie baby. Four hours away, a boy –

almost known as Harry Styles, is tucked in bed   white 

bread cling-filmed. he sleeps soundly. i find the surreptitious 

floor of my parents’ room; can’t undress the movie from my flesh. 

III – Park

we were driving

to Grovelands

when the car crashed –

i learnt to wear 

a seatbelt

head nodding free.

IV – or  

or

could it be 

that inside that car 

the clock was the wrong 

year inside the wrong 

year my family sits round 

a tired table trying 

to chew so silence 

doesn’t get angry – 

holding hands 

in-between 

knives and 

forks

V – Man

One Direction, Busted, The Wanted, JLS have all lived in Princess Park Manor, a luxury complex in Barnet once a mental hospital home to 2,500 patients. After years of complaints on January 27, 1903 one of the wards caught fire. 52 women were killed, many of them trapped in their beds.

what i mean to say by all this

is i don’t know how to say 

any of this but by recurring 

dissociative dream as far 

back as memory hauls me.

they sit at the edge of my 

little bed, an impending choir 

of sprechstimme saying:

deep breathing activates the other 

nervous system. we found stillness 

in Tottenham Cemetery. don’t pass

us your microphone Harry –

the PA system in the corner 

is temperamental. last week it edged 

so close – can’t hear ourselves think. 

have you lot noticed 

your yawns don’t work? even 

in bed you don’t get what you need. 

go on, crawl up our legs, suffocate 

at the waistline. things used to be

safe near a stomach – bless them. 

we’ve been waiting and so what:

you bought 52 deck chairs? that won’t 

solve a thing now our bodies are smoke. 

Epilogue – cess (part II)

what i mean to say is 

i don’t know what to say 

on Friday when there’s 

nobody left to attend 

his funeral

Gemma Barnett won the 2021 ‘Poetry for Good’ prize judged by Rachel Long and was featured on BBC Woman’s Hour. She was a winning finalist of BBC Words First in 2021 with ‘i killed them when they came for my kid’. Her poem ‘My Abortion was Funny’ was selected and published in the Verve Poetry Festival Anthology on Protest 2023 and commended for the Out-Spoken Poetry Prize 2023. Her debut short film ‘Bridge’ has so far been selected for BAFTA/BIFA qualifying Norwich Film Festival. She was commended for the Poetry Kit Spring Competition and is currently on the long-list for the AUB International Poetry Prize.