Mandra

Words by Anna O’Boyle

It was Mandra who one morning decided she would wear another face.

It was Mandra who one evening peeled away her old skin and ate it sautéed with a slice of life novel and sauced by stream of consciousness.

It was Mandra who, in the afternoon, asked Rachel Cusk to reject her character and sucked the bleeding toes of T. S. Eliot, who, as it happens, had just written The Wasteland.

It was Mandra who, at nine a.m., opened a physics exam and answered the impossible question: What is your name?

It was Mandra who, when the two-headed cow could be heard calling for its three-headed calf, decided to sick up that old skin and sell it to the art collector, calling it Mediation on the Modern Condition.

It was Mandra who, at the behest of a passing telephone box, decided to wee on the side of the road and was arrested for bearing an abject body.

It was Mandra who, with the nocturnal animals, went to a soup kitchen offering old skin blended and served with a celeriac sea foam, smelling only slightly of cyanide.

It was Mandra who, at the death of the monarchy, asked to be the poet king and offered, as example of her work, an obituary of her older sister Mandra, who, on deeper inspection, didn’t exist.

It was Mandra who, in the golden pitch of defilement, began to play with what words mean and sang forth a song suggesting Beowulf was only the next best thing to the tinfoil breath of the great god brown.

It was Mandra who, at the encroachment of 4:48, settled into the toe-curling comfort of her sonnet cage.

It was Mandra who, one seven am, stumbled with the joggers along Lancaster West and returned to write her memoir of the vanities.

It was Mandra who burned them.

It was Mandra who asked me instead to wear her face and write to the world about Mandra.