Slings and Pellets

Be ready for action
 
give a slight cough
be wearing a dark suit and definitely male
in a vaulted seat-of-Government interior
 
holding the floor
 
Holding the sky
 
A mass of men are storming my house, on the scullery roof, staring into the window, although the blind is down, trying to see in. I need protection! The felting will be ravaged by their tyre-treaded boots!
 
I grab the blue handset we were buying on the day when two soldiers in a car were surrounded by a mob, dragged out and beaten. Too late for the helicopter. What had they been thinking, driving into that district against clear orders? Playing out in real time on a screen in the shop, while we compared colours and buttons on telephones.
 
Tears to melt stones.
 
˜
 
Reckless or fearless?
 
‘Most of them are just teenage boys who can’t write their name and have only been to chanting school; they’ve never read the texts that ideology draws on. They’ve grown up in camps with the women all indoors, occupied with infants and the tasks of survival.’
 
She was filing a report, filming herself in the street on her mobile, veil folded back, when a passing fourteen-year-old levelled a rifle; ‘Never show your face again! You less than an animal!’ He meant it literally. She was so enraged, she swore at him in Pashto. That seemed to confuse him, the sound of his language in the mouth of a foreigner. And receiving a curse from a tongue that wasn’t human.
 
It’s pretty hard to push against a psyched-up throng coming through a tunnel with the strength of hundreds of bodies behind them.
 

Mary Michaels

in collection Games of Soldiers, 2023, Sea Cow Press, ISBN 978-0-9506729-6-0

 
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Bourton Revisited

‘Going for the throat’
 
a bird with wings open, stretching, neck down, towards another
or ‘kissing’ – that’s the second interpretation
 
the possibility that one might be feeding the other
only being proffered by a third party, late in the speculation
 
he used to get up before dawn, he’d told her
in the cold London house, to meditate, alone
 
thinking that being thirty-five, without a proper home or a job
or any kind of qualification, was bearable
but not so in prospect, twenty years down the line
 
‘I was in a facetious mood,’ he’d explained
and she’d registered this as not the right use of the word
 
they used to drive round the roads as teenagers
drinking and shooting from their pick-ups at cans
 
(it was a small town called Boredom, Ontario, where he grew up)
 
since then, the statue of Pan on the lawn
 
has been permanently floodlit, the heating improved
an odd-job man arrives at eight in the morning and works until nightfall
scrupulously clearing up after the guests
 
his white skin reddened with being out of doors
an open wound in his light blue eyes
 
of the three carved tablets there were two she could recall
 
the standing crucifixion
with a halo like a wheel behind the head of Christ
centurion with spear and centurion with sponge, all facing forward
 
and a robed apostle holding out a key
but the third was –
 
scoured clean, every village they enter
not a bit of litter, not a single medallion of flattened chewing gum
on any of the pavements
looking ‘Absolutely lovely!’ and ‘Unutterably twee!’
 
she wonders by what sanctions this is achieved.
 

Mary Michaels

in collection Caret Mark, 2008, Hearing Eye,
ISBN 978-1-905082-40-7

 
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A Marriage

The night before last
I saw the new construction
at the back of the house
 
the join was seamless
and the new room looked
like a generous curving out of the old
tall and warm and tightly containing
with not many windows
it seemed very private
 
No-one looking at it now would know
that this was the place from which
three months ago
I’d pulled out a brick
at the base of the building
 
no-one who saw it would have any idea
how the walls had crumpled
in a soundless rush
sunk into themselves
like a chimney falling
 
Destroyed in a second
the house I pulled down
had somehow put itself together again
risen, in spite of me, on solid grounding.
 

Mary Michaels

in collection Assassins, 2006, Sea Cow Press,
ISBN 0-9506729-5-5 / 978-0-9506729-5-3

 
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Selling for Scrap

                                               ‘L’argent n’a pas d’odeur’
 
The gate glides open
              there’s a smell of rust
 
just unlock the boot
he’ll carry them in
              he smells of soap
 
He lifts out the bags
              they smell of dust
 
old pennies
halfpennies
 
“Sure they’re not cashable?”
 
“No, so many people
hung onto them
not even collectable”
 
He plays with the weight on the bar
till it balances
 
takes a wad from his pocket
hands over six notes
              they smell of grime
              and airlessness
                            rancid.
 

Mary Michaels

in collection The Shape of the Rock, 2003, Sea Cow Press,
ISBN 0-9506729-4-7 / 978-0-9506729-4-6

 
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