on the landing halfway
down the stairs, my palm on the handle
not enough to still
the impetus of the suitcase. It takes
a bruise on my thigh to stop it.
From the box of things to give away
– signs I was once here –
I grab my phone, plug it in
in the passage, and sit
on the stack of phonebooks against the wall.
Hallo Mama, I answer.
I am leaving for a new place,
each further from where I started.
Across the seven-hour time difference I fear
I will never see her again.
I want to say out loud I am losing
a centre to which I can return,
but do not.
She speaks too in a way flattened
by what is not said, coming only so close
to the parting between us by telling me
to leave safely.
Across the growing distance
I hear her voice receding from me.
I make her leave me
so I can be still.
Cinnamon
I fall outside
the warm stole
of history.
Eyes run down my skin
like a single finger.
I find you
open as a tent.
You are cinnamon
curved around me.
Old Story
A woman is walking across the tiled square between tall buildings. The landscape is empty and leached of colour. Her footsteps resound in the silence. The balls of her shoes grind a little dust with each step. Her long jacket is black and close as sculpture. Hair and cloth flow in a single line.
She walks around the corner of a building, and suddenly stops.
The purity of the silence seizes our hearing, like the gaping moments before a thunderclap. Around the corner is a snake, a large snake somehow at home in the bleached light and dust.
On seeing her, it raises its head vertiginously. Their eyes meet.
There is a moment of stillness, a greeting, as there must be.
After this stillness that is not hesitation, the woman leaps to her right and starts running. Her footfalls are stern as thunder. The dust settles slowly after she has passed.
The snake throws itself sideways after her, as it must. In the desert, snakes move across the furnace of sand in a spare movement like the snap of a whip or loose sail.
It is an impossible, even race, a study in different configurations of bone and weight. We see the ripple in each hair pass through each scale. Around them hard surfaces look liquid.
Suddenly, the sound changes.
The snake rounds a corner and stops. A vibration draws its eyes up. The woman is climbing a metal ladder. The echoes of her steps fall like dust. After a moment, the snake winds itself round the ladder, like a vine on a tree.
The woman pulls herself up, her hands sure as music. Across her shoulders, a thin strap holds a bag against her back. Inside its netted surface rests a red answer. An apple.
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