These Parts

It was a howl to start myth, like Demeter without her

daughter, up along the track lined with orange groves.

To walk into it was to walk into the way life is,

the two girls, fists in their mouths, shoulders peaked,

eyes unlearning a secret. It was a fattened, hairy sow

held across a wooden table by seven men. It was hard

to see what they were doing - bleeding or skinning it alive -

some surgery the mountains had a taste for, hands busy

with it, stroking, touching - their words a quiet, loving hymn.

The thyme and the rosemary grew on. To step in

would have been to convulse scenery, speak in gravel.

The track rose into the hills. The woman I was walked on it.

Her throat was closed, her ears seared with death's bellow,

the men's patter. Only then did she reach up to a tree,

                               steal her first orange.

Awarded Third Prize in London Writer's Competition, 2006

Now You're a Woman

She knows what she is doing.

     The guardsmen are soft with solstice,

           careless with so much darkness.

She bathes in goat's milk to be kid-tender,

     asks her lady-hand to comb her hair,

           as if it matters.

She's told she's beautiful, some kind of princess

     and tonight she believes it.

            Her eyes glint scimitars.

She listens for the owl call,

     the pop of carp breaking the surface.

           Her bed is made ready.

She drifts into its down, quiet as a snow hearse,

     flattens her palms on the linen, as she should,

           enjoys its handiwork for the first time.

She has four seconds while the lady-hand

     turns, four seconds for one hundred years,

           if it's true.

She glides the hidden needle

     from her laced cuff, pierces her finger hard,

           sees the red pool spread

a map of deepest sleep

     over which she flies

           and watches herself flying, futuristic,

                 untouchable as an entire world,

                       dancing on the head of a pin.

Published in The Stony Thursday Book, Issue 5, 2006  

The Slip Road  

When my parents pulled out of the slip road

onto the bypass, it was lashing it down

in dark morning curtains. I heard my mother's

'OK left', or 'Right, all clear', or some

direction she's given for over forty years.

Then the gentlest disbelieving wail

and the phone went dead.

I left my body, flew up the length of England

over the Irish Sea to follow all roads

into Belfast, till I was led to them,

their car hit side-on at sixty. Chest

and brain are different injuries, separate

hospitals, no voice or sight of each other

for eleven nights, their longest parting.

My mother hated bothering the staff.

My father asked the Filipino nurse to bring

the nurse. Slowly they came home, drank smoothies

and slept a decade back, each so tender

to the other that we knew they had said

goodbye, then found it wasn't time to leave.

And I, in that dreadful fusing across space,

felt the sharp tug of my beginning, their lives

accidentally pierced and filled with love.

Published in 'One Wanted Thing', Lagan Press, 2006

The Future of Something Delicate

All winter I watched your single cyclamen

unbend its crook

to upflutter in the only light,

letting the light come in

where it could not go itself

to make such pink,

a butterfly asana.

Only now can I begin to feel

how slow your seasons are,

how long buds shepherded

in that crinkled shade,

how much it took to float

your field of veined paths,

to trust some earth.