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first
published The Rialto;
in
collection, Stealing The Eiffel Tower, 1997,
Rockingham
Press ISBN 1-873468-50-4
Course Work
I know her again in
the curve of her neck,
rinse
conditioner through knotted hair
as
she kneels by the bath, silent for a moment
reprieve
from sulks about empty freezers
doors
slamming at dawn, black lipstick.
The
infection in the fourth hole of her ear-lobe
she’s
dealing with herself. I massage her scalp
this
remains one thing I can do.
Smell
of almond, swell of a back that’s more
like
her father’s. There is blood on the pack
under
the chops. She arranges them on the table
with
the rusty cleaver I bought in Beijing
a
year before she was born. She’s decided to do
eight
pieces of work about meat and knives,
copies
traces of blood soaked into the absorbent pad
— it
must be designed deliberately.
My
mother asked the butcher to separate bills
from
weekly deliveries; dried out crimson puddled
accounts
on the metal spike in the bedroom cupboard.
She
never mentions her cousin who died with a snap
of
his spine. The axe slices into slabs of pink flesh.
I’ve
been buying meat all week. Who’d love a butcher,
red
fingers scrubbed, apron tight over a smooth belly.
I
need white she says, for the fat. She switches to oils,
asks
me to look in Sainsbury’s for a really red fillet.
Blood
on the pack, stains on the back of a skirt,
curve
of her neck as she leans over the paper.
Jane Kirwan
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