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You’re three feet high — with wings. Someone silver-pencilled you there, where the syringa will, one day, bud blank-white as your dress.
Soon the old man next door will buy you, but not your sister, an ice-cream, and you’ll begin to learn the power of wings.
Much later, you’ll wear wings in white on black as if by Mary Quant. But you’re not confident.
A young man will bring a corsage of orchids — curved scrapes of wax freckled with dried blood.
Next, wings blue-green as oil in the rain. You’ll not be sure of the man with blonde hair who brings you from Glastonbury the riff from his guitar.
Your wings are red, thatchered with power. You’ll get what you want, then change your mind. Your booty will include garnets, hearts, gardenias, black pearls, a small car like a plum.
But then comes Requisition afternoon. Your wings will be recalled — detached, not painlessly — removed, not without sound.
And you are left in the dry day wondering if you ever learnt to fly or was it silver paper, cardboard, a high wind?
Your daughter will find a photo of a girl, three feet high, with wings.
published in Staple, 63, Autumn 2005; in forthcoming collection, Looking Good, 2009 Shoestring Press
My mother can’t bear to watch me dying (she says ). She sits in the Public Library
and pretends to read. So now I’ve become my grandmother’s child.
This is temporary. We collaborate on salads, negotiate meat, weigh apples.
She feeds me careful cubes of chicken. I’m her very good tabby cat
(for the time being ). But my mother cooks chips in a seething golden haze,
makes toffee at midnight with a dark reek of sugar,
and, out for lunch the other day, while I ate three tenths of a salad,
she gorged on Knickerbocker Glory. No protein. No vitamins. I told her that.
She laughed and ordered a Drambuie. Now she’s eating bread and marmalade
with huge glaring bites. There’s something wild about her. Feral? Yes, she’s feral.
Shoestring Press
Hunger is your baby. You nurse her constantly. You sling her at your breast
for the slow purposeful trudge, but your breasts are flat, she has nuzzled you so.
You show her your world — meat, fruit and cheeses, ten sorts of bread.
You’re enticed by the deep night-blue of poppy-seed but you manage to turn away.
Dinner-time for Hunger — you give her a rusk, five apple seeds, a thimble of skimmed milk.
Then you both sleep cheek to cheek. (You need so much sleep.)
published in Other Poetry, Series II No. 30, 2006; in forthcoming collection, Looking Good, 2009 Shoestring Press
This is your meal — formal as the levée of a royal personage, some pale Infanta decked out for Corpus Christi.
For how but in custom and in ceremony could you expose your body to this extreme event?
Try a pale kidney, naked from the grill or the small moist heart of a lamb chop or the white breast of a tiny bird?
You’ve renounced the treason of vegetables since butter, like a dagger, was concealed in the dish.
Once you sliced the globe of an egg and its yellow eye stared at you. You’re like a funeral or a coronation.
Perform your stately and exiguous feeding. People might even pay to watch you eat — some would give anything to see it.
published in Smiths Knoll, 38, 2006; in forthcoming collection, Looking Good, 2009 Shoestring Press |
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