They’re small animals
wriggling to get out
Just let us touch the crust, they say
feel it crackle
essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
They’re small animals
wriggling to get out
Just let us touch the crust, they say
feel it crackle
I know it’s over when I picture the train carriage
it’s an old-fashioned carriage with burgundy velvet seats
a little room in my memory.
You are sun-skinned, but my half
of the planet is tumbling into the dark.
It is an old superstition.
The mirror, and the room
dark behind it but for the
flickering of a few fading
candles.
My memories can be quantified in cups of tea,
and meat pies filled perfectly, slumped against
a mountain of mash
Like thirst – a need to quench, slake, state:
first hearse, first coffin and pallbearing.
I become great at darts, a phenomenon
on dart circuits, earning enough from darts
to pay for lobster rolls
maybe they look down
at their bodies as they left them
in neat rows, heads of wheat
crackling green and gold
She arms herself with the metal pipe of the Electrolux
with the precision of a marksman
(coffee, pastry,
food-words,
unfettered time)
Words words words black as a cat.
I just saw you in the periphery of
Manet’s Olympia — or maybe Cézanne’s
…across the bitter world, a sweet gift from Pachamama
like my father who taught me to feel
and press its skin: a map of lost worlds