Beware the silent child (4)
The arcade is a belly of echoes,
jingles glancing off games and slot machines,
repeat
repeat
repeat,
punters’ voices a murmur that dies on the carpet.
You enter to spend a penny,
then retrace your steps to the exit, unnoticed,
see the shore as a distant background for a jumble of toys
and stop by the glass box with a fluffy menagerie.
Follow the white rabbit is a line from a book,
from a movie—and now a whisper.
The metal pincers grab the bunny’s left ear,
lift then slide and dangle it towards you—drop it
into the small chute. Magic rabbits only cost a pound.
The bunny’s head sticks out of your coat pocket,
glass eyes trained on your scribbling hand.
The present is a struggle so you think up a future,
write it into stories that
please those who thrive on dereliction,
stories about damage and comeuppance,
collapse and renewal, technology
woven into biology.
Tracing a new timeline,
you raise legends from the mud
and wrap them in dystopia.
Now picture yourself on the page:
She cups a flame,
inhales
and leans on the railing.
The sea turns on its bed,
exhales
with each wave.
B. Anne Adriaens currently lives in Somerset. Her work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Bloody Amazing! Abridged, Poetry Scotland, IS&T, Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic, Confluence Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review (forthcoming) and The Other Side of Hope (forthcoming).