It’s not until each candle is snuffed, shrugs off
its stuttering light so spirals of smoke thin upwards
that the wreck of embers finally closes its eyes.
She pinches a hushed, warm stump between thumb
and wet finger, hears it wince like a swallowed tongue ‒
its silty phrase sticking to her fingertips. She wipes
two soot lines across each cheek as if arming herself
for battle and in the blackout fidgets in a high-backed chair
until stars shift above tree tops, lose themselves.
There’s no squeal of hinges, slammed front door,
trampled feet across lino ‒ just the back of a hand
ghosting from shadows as if sky suddenly fell.
Today voices riddle like woodworm, each larva
gleams, stretches to a long vowel that sounds
like whisky tumbling into a glass, the empty echo
of a spanner dropped in a cold garage.
She watches the window: the glass, not the view ‒
knows crossing beyond it is out of the question.
We all start in water ‒ endure its fullness,
bellies hoarding each molecule,
the swell of its ocean windblown
for a thousand miles.
So when her tide breaks,
she’s hauled from
the house with the knowledge
she’s rupturing.
I brim mid-stride
on the uneven pavement, split our blood
for the first time. She watches me
glisten across tarmac,
takes her fulsome weight from the kerb
to the taxi, hopes to replenish
us both with a sack full of saline,
knows
she’s not the right one
to receive the cuckoo-baby nestling
in the thud of her pelvic bones.
You thicken in me in the hottest June for years.
A soft fist smudges the wall of my womb and at night,
when it is already too hot to sleep, I watch your
elbow soar like a sail and imagine you journeying
upstream, skin pinking at a confluence of rivers,
body uncertain, smirching the bank. You’re waiting
for liberation, foetus shaping in liquid until you
come adrift on a crib-shaped island with the map
of life crumpled in the tiniest palm I can imagine.
I see you unroll its tide-worn edges years later,
when you’ve waded with my handmade limbs
through life’s inky waters. I picture you with my
youthful face and in early morning light, hear
for the first time how you pronounce your name.
Today my face revolves to a full moon on the scan.
You stroke the weight of me and I know you need two
hands now just to gather me in. I sense the thrum
of your voice oscillate through muscle and roar like a river
at its mouth, ready for the swell. I want you to hear me.
I don’t yet know there’s only two months left with you,
I don’t know it is not a love that lasts a lifetime.
Or a shared one. I hear that voice of yours
in my underworld through all your sleepless nights
and don’t know that all the things you say aren’t just to me.
I don’t yet know, nuzzled here in the very centre of you
that I won’t hear your voice on the other side.
You grow in me. I call you petal
and your name buds on my tongue at night.
We’re spooned in sleep, skin on skin
and I purr lullabies from sap-filled lips until
your limbs purl like newly-woken shoots:
fresh leaves wait for nursing, suckling.
I name you Lily, and in the bulb of my belly
the veins of your body knit together
and you sleepwalk inside me,
make tiny footprints in blurred dreams,
trail my spine with satin feet as if you
own each and every inch of me. I don’t know
which one of us is the honey, which the bee,
or who has the nectar we drink so
