Bowie

By Georgia Luckhurst

Well I’m a Capricorn 

he says. Bowie. 1970 something. 

Ribbed knit bubbling in greenish studio light. The interviewer, D. B., 

and the third character, his thinness, the meagre remainder left to express. I have harboured all my life 

a taste for slim presentation. 

Suits that sculpt like tulip petals 

around their recomposed stalk. 

Once as a child 

I broke a coat hanger 

to extract the question from its angles, wring its twine back and forth 

until it snapped. 

My body also: 

how I look today 

in my grandest jacket, 

like my shoulders have squared up to a brick. There must be a reason 

I am obsessed with correctness. 

With looking the vulnerable way I feel. I was born into an upside-down family, or under a shy wince of moon. 

That’s Bowie. 

Jazzing on stage in alien fits. 

Storing his signatures 

like dry-cleaned sleeves. 

They sway in his wardrobe 

and I follow with my eyes. 

Windchimes. Electric ash. 

I catch in his costumes, 

single hangnail in a pocket.