Of Roadkill and Other Corpses, and: The Registrar’s Office, and: July, and: Reasons to Fear Butterflies, and: Of August Karen McCarthy Woolf (bio) Of Roadkill and Other Corpses After the birth she spends a year and a half taking photographs of dead animals and prizes the most pristine. Her collection includes a mole, its pink, fleshy digits spread wide like oars; an open-eyed field mouse with a blade of grass and a bluebottle on its flank; a hawk in a stream; a fledgling wren; a flattened rabbit in threshed straw, its hind legs splayed like an X in a crossword square; a field littered with disintegrating geese, their ribs and feathers matted to form a hardened, gelatinous web. There is also a radiant mallard surrounded by a constellation of dandelion flowers and clocks and, finally, a pony on its back at the side of the road that cuts through Dartmoor. The pony’s legs stick up into the air and a cylinder of dung protrudes halfway out of its anus. The pony’s genitalia are exposed and she can be identified as a mare. The Registrar’s Office isn’t really an office, it’s a cupboard withno source of natural light, and I don’trealise it but I’m loved up like the othermothers gazing at meconium as if it’s fresh taron a road not an odourless, black shitthat’s been on the boil for nine months andLydia, that’s the registrar’s name, shegives me a paper cone of iced water fromthe dispenser to calm me down and itdoes calm me, the water flows through [End Page 14] me and now we’re holding each other whileSimon’s down in the mortuary and I tellher all about how he lost his mother froma brain tumour when I was six monthsgone, how her name was Lydia too, thatit was so quick and now this.We’re still holding on when he comes backthen joins us in a circle of three and evenanother form to fill in can’t sober me upas the morphine unpeels another mezzanineof hell in a shopping centre where womenwith rigid quiffs and rouged cheeks glideup and down glass escalators andpeople believe in the faux marble fountainsalthough it’s all really a shimmeringcolon. Anyway, I’m determined, I say,as I leave the room, when I get out of here, ifit’s the last thing I do, I will get youa window because that’s not right, expectingsomeone to live and work and signdeath certificates without a window, no-oneshould have to put up with that, it’s notright, she’s a good person witha good heart, she should have a window. July & today iscrackle planted inside me a pylon straddlingthe borders of a field & when there was noanxiety [End Page 15] in the full bloom of summerwhen the pavements were dusty as my stomach swelled then droppedI accentuated its taut lollipop by layering fuchsia and peonyconducting telegraphed conversations with my idea of you, morningsI woke when the light was tentative scrutinised the gaps in the treetopsand made videos of my feet breathless from weight pressingon the diaphragm, a pillow squeezed between my thighs, a swooshingwater bomb and all of this not forgotten, as drifts of birdsongblack bullocks—stirks, jostling by the gate, berries turningfrom green to red, deep mud under hooves Reasons to Fear Butterflies Unexpected movement—a suddenness where nothing is as it seems, wingsdotted with owl eyes, earson furry tips How they feed on our secretions:sweat, saliva, tears I imagine themon the water’s surface, suckingthe sea as if it were a teat [End Page 16] hours slashing the airlike blindness. Their silk a thread of fearthat runs from throat to clitoris tingling Of August Two agents, an editor, and a couple of publishers come to the University for a panel discussion. On the train on the way home, one of...