Angela France
lives in Gloucestershire, England and is enjoying middle age. She runs a local live poetry event—Buzzwords—and writes for self-indulgence, as an antidote to demanding work with challenging young people. She has recently started studying for an M.A. in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Gloucestershire.
Among her poetry credits are Acumen, Iota, The Frogmore Papers, The Shit Creek Review, and Orbis and the anthologies The White Car, Mind Mutations and When Pigs Chew Stones.
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Rejecting Gravity
It wasn’t sudden; not a penny
dropping, nor an apple falling from a tree
sort of moment.
At first, just little bounces while no-one
watched. Then long strides; longer,
a lighter hold on heel, ball, toe.
Hedges were easy to clear; walls,
buildings, required more belief.
Moonless nights hid clumsy
hops and jumps, cloaked
tangles with trees and telephone wires.
My first thoughtless soar ended
in daylight on a car park roof; left
me shaken, possibilities fizzing
under my skin. I toured the town,
roof to roof. Up. Tower blocks,
multi-stories. Higher. A strong kick
took me up to scatter astonished gulls;
I pulled faces at jet pilots, sent them screaming
back to base for assessment. I played
peek-a-boo behind the billowed curve
of a hot air balloon.
Then it started. Pot-shots from hunters,
clay pigeon shooters, boys with air-guns.
I ducked a bolt from a high-tech crossbow
and caught in my hand a slow arrow
from a costumed archer. Dodging
and diving, I survived the day. At dusk
I exhaled, drifted down to a rocky
beach; filled my pockets with pebbles,
found a back-pack, stuffed it with stones.
Now, I don’t buy close fitting
clothes, can’t go out without a bag.
I recognise other weighted women
by the shape of their ballast, the careful
balance of each step. We exchange
looks, move on. We know
what we could do.
[Originally published in The Frogmore Papers no. 68]
Artist’s Statement
R
ejecting Gravity was a milestone for me because it was the first poem that succeeded in something I’d been interested in for some time.
I hesitate to use the word “fantasy” as that tends to conjure dungeons and dragons; perhaps “speculative fiction” is a better fit for this approach. I find it very liberating to use the fantastic to explore the human condition because themes that may risk being didactic can be realised in a way that allows the reader to discover them for themselves. I also enjoy the variety of interpretations that readers offer for a poem like this: it seems to respond to the readers own concerns in a way that more ‘realistic’ poems don’t.
I had tried the approach a number of times and found it difficult to get it right: such poems walk a tightrope between metaphor and reality and can easily just seem silly if their internal logic isn’t sound. Rejecting Gravity, as well as being the first of this type that I had accepted for publication, was the poem where it all fell into place for me.
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