To Get Inside

First, Mum gets out my birth certificate:
a strange fragment slid out of lilac plastic,

delicate as Great-Nanny’s forearm flesh,
exclaiming in faded Britannia-red ink

every inch of my undeveloped history,
edged curdling under a slab of October sky

as if pained by this newfound nudity,
snatched by the scary lady’s anvil hands.

Next zips un-zipped — our pockets gutted,
contents laid out in a mass burial across

a bogey-shaded nail-gouged table —
then down, down, to the menagerie of men

to air clogged with cheap washing powder
and apple cider vinegar, the meaty balm

of Y chromosomes and sound convulsing,
coagulating, into a brief, desperate hum.

Pendulum

On a bench with a broken back
a woman smokes a cigarette,
the dog-end glows, ashes.
I am stuck in the city’s throat,
nobody knows me here.
My eyes roam tarmac veins
& overhead, sky so saccharine
you can virtually taste it.
Stood in a charity shop’s cavity
I watch it blaze & fade.
I see my Mum’s cinnamon stick
fingers busy making roll-ups,
allotting them in tidy rows.
The woman’s face appears
from the smoke like a prophet.
A pigeon tucks into nothing.
I offer my hands out to the cold,
here they are — open & empty.
Time drags her battered hems.

Night Shift

The estate lugs its weight in untranslatables;
your scoured fingers uncouple second skin
and limb by limb the seams become undone.
Outside, cats mewl into night’s black brick,
bittersweet cloys tongue the way morphine
does, or molasses caught on a spoon’s back.

We sit quiet in the planetary face of the TV
while an artificial halo radiates our temples;
you fan your bare chest with a medical visor,
stretched along the sofa like a black hyphen.

Makeshift

At first you were just an empty grape punnet stacked with the recycling, lightweight but weatherproof; a thing that would last longer than me, long after me and the medley of birds commandeering our apple tree. I found an old flower crown from some forgotten summer, snipped it in the centre and looped it through the middle holes, where seven mauve peonies arched like a sickle, settling into newfound shape. Then came the weight – a rickle of robin feed, safflower seeds orange dappled by the sun nosing its way into my kitchen, raisins puckered to a leathery polyp, other pips, nuts, seeds, that I cannot name and a number of freeze-dried mealworms, favourite of the songbirds, turning with each step. No longer just an empty filmy body, but a body of matter transient as water, behind my hands carrying you out into the garden and up to the tree, hooking you over the severed branch, the stumped limb, who seemed to enjoy such adornments. From this vantage point, over grey mud forming my birthmark’s likeness, over sleeping larvae moulting their former selves, I watch you, my new relic, being rocked by circling winds carried over from god-knows-where. In a patch of red sun a bumble-bee tries out your infertile flowers. A blue tit twitches, belly full. More have come to gather now, to cling to you, unfettered.

Last Shift at St. Wins

You laugh as a hold out my hands,
my blue plastic wrapped fingers

and try a few aimless notes,
vowels bouncing all around us,

a mirage of floating faces
reflected in white tile.

You look over me
with your small ripe eyes,
those ruinous black pupils,

creased lids pulsing
like you’re trying to say something.

I’m listening— I’m listening—
but I’m still unable to decode the message

and you cup your wilting hands
into ramekins,
one for each of us,

as if to say: I know you see me
I see you too

Kitchen

This is only the second visit.
The air hums of garlic

crushed and stewed in butter
and my taste buds twitch

to taste it, muscle memory —
my small tongue salivates,

coated in phantom broth.
Sade wafts over wailing cats,

a cricket bat whacked across
blurs of ant heads.

We’re making jelly now.
As I separate the juicy cubes,

ripe with cow fat and pineapple,
her Little Bo Peep figurine

shoots me this look, crook raised,
to remind me how alien I am.

Scuffing

I picture my mother at eleven years old —

bow-legged, pint-sized, confined in her uniform,
eyes weary even then, pulled in at the corners,
cast in hickory, flecked with gold,

the shame shade Diana Ross and the Supremes wore
on the cover of Cream of the Crop, shook those hips in.

Gappy teeth, freckled cheeks, walking home from school,
dragging new Clarks against salmagundi brick,

their leather-cracked cry trailing behind
like the music of a cabasa made from gourd,
like bay leaves laughing, rice and peas boiling.

I see her enjoying the scuffing, reveling in its wrongness —

the desecration of shoes so dismally British, so hideous,
mouth flung open to the sky, armed to the back teeth
with glee and remembering

that pot of Kiwi Black polish under the sink, that’ll slide over
the damage like shea butter.

I see her playing out the trouble she’d be in, hearing it
like an echo in an aluminium can,
Great-Nanny’s voice rearing up

over the ruins, the crime scene

then simmering down to a tiny puff of steam
because she’s eleven, grown, a God —

A Caged Thing Freed

Your mouth slips out a sound, a sound of the world dying and reborn again,
an utterance of expanding space, time, sound flinging out of your warm

fleshy mouth, out from your pink oyster mushroom lips and for a second,
with your back burning white in the afternoon sun, you become an arctic fox

rolled over a damp mossy log. Your paw-hands dressed in skin stretch along
my many grooves like a spill, round red knuckles flushing pale at the grip.

The unfathomable patience we commit to, to prolong this shared annihilation,
to remain inside the brink. I will take my time with you — trace your temples,

your chest, every palm crease, the constellation formed inside your spine’s bow,
the cool flint of your ankles. Through an open window, in the sun’s fullness,

a wasp sneaks in — dusting shadows over your nose-bride while our bedsheets
knot themselves up. Here, I can hear your animal heart: bang bang boom.

Naturalist

I check if my head is still attached to my neck —
if my heart still beats, if any teeth have let

go, unfastened from sockets, ground to powder,
fusion of rapture and ache in equal measure;

first comes sting, bliss soon after, eyes roaming
the cryptic dark of a just-surfaced fantasy.

Below, Genuwine’s Pony mounts the subwoofer,
chip shop vinegar cartwheels up the stairs.

I feel like I’ve been initiated into new territories,
like I could dip my fingers in the odd blotch

staining the mattress and paint myself with it
bound through the village a howling thing.

A robin chimes outside. I see her bright red breast.
The thumping heart of a young, naked, ash tree.