Jobs for Women: Annunciate – by A Frances Johnson
HIGHLY COMMENDED IN THE GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2020/21
After Piero Della Francesca’s ‘Annunciation’, fresco, Basilica of San Francesco, Arezzo, 1452–55
1
She won’t go easily; two great wings
pinion mild spring air, remind her
of less feathered rapes. Destiny,
like crime, was never aerodynamic.
She is robust; sulky lips purse a third cigarette.
Here, there are no jobs for young people.
The angel’s eyes burn.
Will you do it? Will you?
She turns to an unshuttered glare.
Flies drone and butt stone jambs,
breakfast crumbs say nothing.
She stipulates a lifetime supply of blue
and white silk, matching heels and five
kilograms of menthols to share
with the hazel-eyed butcher’s son.
The muscled angel turns, gimlet-eyed.
She does not know he’s capable of slaughter,
caryatid power holding roof and sky.
One wing-tap cracks a temple vault.
2
He returns one too-bright summer day,
feathered door-to-door salesman
with business or blackmail to prosecute.
Above poor marketplace alleys
of date, rug and fig, a drone flies low.
Wailing, smoke and rugged colours bloom.
The girl’s sister is there. She frets, takes a drag
and drums her brow, needing to save.
My sister, she cries, is fetching, more
paintable at her prie-dieu than I! Help her!
He pauses, calculates for an aeon,
summons vaudevillian weather,
reverses code on a remote Virginian server.
This gentle trick deletes the strike.
He sees her curl two fingers, open palm
pre-empting papal jest and briared burns.
But up close he sees the little lowlife’s butting ash!
This job becomes too hard, he rues,
picturing morose Lucifer on broken swing,
long leave for superannuated angels.
The wrong girl cast will cost him;
art can offend the real but never God.
3
She holds ashless hands to a window
of sky already hammering out
rococo ascensions. On cue, her beloved
butcher’s son appears below the frame,
chasing some other garlanded girl
towards the glow of the harvest feast.
Spurts of fresh blood rosy his apron.
Poems of love and lust, she cries tearily,
will be written without me. The angel,
impatient, stares her down, rubbing
great wings as insects do. She laughs
nervously as new explosions fire off
across the city, south of Galilee,
death’s collateral sound map.
They live, he says. Your sister lives.
But she won’t be pimped out cheaply.
When did you give a flying? she snarls,
venom immaculate, unwritten.
So she insists: a giftpack of every titanium
device connecting heaven and earth.
4
When she opens her eyes, she’s cloaked
in blue and gold, painted robe revealing
a single breast like a bordello veil.
In gilded light, she extends teen hands
as if submitting to cuffs or prayer.
He goes through the motions:
pray, kneel, hold (child, lily, corpse),
remonstrate, submit, ascend.
Her new job – to repeat and repeat.
Outside the frame she lights up,
pulls the shutter down, and waits.
This poem appeared in Island 161 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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