BEDROOM is the last stamp on your passport. Across your chest, down the length of your skin (and bone), the weight of feathers. You are pinned. Butterfly, bird, chrysalis. Must we all desire flight? New horizons? You can see all the way to the end of your bed and this is far enough. Close one eye and your nose is a mountain, the world at its summit. Take a bath, they say, a lengthy lavender…
Dorothy waited in line at the bus shelter with her shopping trolley in the torpor of mid-afternoon. Through the windows of the approaching bus she could see the lively faces of high schoolers and hoped there’d be a seat. Halfway down the aisle an angular boy mumbled and stood up. As Dorothy was sinking onto the seat with relief, panic seized her. She’d forgotten to buy the all-important lemon. Oh, just this once would…
for my motherpublished in Waiting for the Southerly You used to fish off rocks under whiskered cliffs where crabs eyed me sideways clicking like mice bones. I watched your skill with knife and knot, your toughened skin stained with gut. I peered in pools gummed with limpets, anemones tugged my fingers like blissful newborns. We had the salt and wind, the gulls poised on updraughts and the far reach from beach to open sea. Now you…