Each drawer slides out in silence. First the gradations of white – snow, ivory, pearl – then the browns, greens, shades of fleck, all arranged on sheepskin, named, dated, and geographically placed in a fading scrawl. Clutches of plover, ptarmigan, shrike, and here, a golden eagle’s non-identical twins –  feather-weights in my hands, no albumen or yolk, just cradles of air with tiny man-made holes. While around the room a weight of books: engraved and coloured plates, breeding times, conception, birth, flight. The histories of lives they never lived.

the room darkens
a scuttle of sparrows
in the eaves

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We were the first people at our end of the street to have a fridge. Preparation for it had started weeks before – the brick pantry in the corner of the kitchen was knocked down, new lino laid on the floor. When it was delivered, the neighbours came out to watch its white bulk being trolleyed through the back gate. The next day my mother made ice-lollies from orange squash and I sucked mine until my gums ached.

I was making sandcastles on the beach when I told my friend Kathryn about our new fridge and she hit me over the head with a long-handled spade and ran home crying. My mother said Kathryn didn’t like me being different from her. And we were different now. Our butter was hard. We had frozen peas.

new neighbour:
secretly inspecting
her washing-line

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I dream about my mother’s house, a rush of surf where Silver Avenue used to be, waves spilling over a neighbour’s fence, gardens drowning. I hold her away from the window to protect her, the waves tremendous now, pummelling the glass, spitting through the broken seals in the window frame. The next one will crash through. I pick my mother up, her body small and pale like a baby’s, and run to another room.

welcome hug
each time I come home
my mother is shorter

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Plump ‘Queens’ glistening in oil,

the size of small eggs, or little

beads of green stuffed with garlic, jalapeno,

or laced with herbs and sun-dried tomato,  

or the glossy black ones we ate

in Juan Carlos’ bar on Carrer d’Albet

with white anchovies and litres of sweet cava

then walked home up Via Laietana

through Eixample, up Carrer

St Juan to the apartment we rented that year,

opposite the supermercado where I bought them in tins,

con huesos, or pitted – sin

huesos, the Spanish for olive pits and bones,

as I remember us then – our bodies

slipped free from their bones, the last time

we made love, the last time we made each other come.

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