‘Call me and I’ll tell you a joke’ by Ailbhe Darcy

A joke with bones in it,
and the idea of dancing
but not the dancing itself.
My sister’s prescription
for chronic tantrum, micro

clots, mewling jag, longest feb,
is just that – dance. But our
protagonist never does.
It’s the only joke I remember –
I reckon it’ll get funnier

with repetition, like Beckett,
and it does. My sister’s calling
me from a field, the wind
stealing her voice, her eyes
white with fluorescent dread –

she has advice for me.
Our protagonist holds, deep
in his bones (where else?),
a memory of dancing, feels it
in his, among other things, phalanges.

A boy I danced with once
asked me to touch each
of his bones (ho ho!) and I did,
I named them for him: mandible,
clavicle, sternum, ribs.

Sex was more innocent then.
Or it wasn’t, but only innocence
is bone-deep, and all that’s left
of me is bones. All my warm
bodies are losing definition,

I’m relinquishing them, skin by skin.
Dance? Our protagonist
is hardly going to pick himself up
by his own tibia, humerus, ulna,
his whole own weight, his skull

spine, pelvis, and take himself out out.
He’s hardly going to pass through
the coat check. No coat, for one thing,
and no pocket for the ticket.
He’s hardly going to eat fat hot chips

from a bag afterwards, muscles firing –
not a muscle to his name, not a single
microcapillary, no nerve endings –
vinegar steam, in a crowd of hot bodies.
He’d frighten everyone in the queue for taxis.

From issue #14: autumn/winter 2022

About the Author
Ailbhe Darcy is from Dublin and lives in Cardiff. Her most recent collection of poems is Insistence (Bloodaxe, 2018) and she is co-editor of A History of Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2021).