She was only a little woman
five feet nothing in nylon stockings.
‘If I stood sideways they’d mark me absent.’

When she said ‘could’, it was clearly in italics
and when she said ‘one day’, the creak of glaciers
shuddered around its edges.

the days are long but the years are short.
seconds are tiny kitchen knives in my back.
i stopped reading Dickinson, her voice is a sad parrot.

Faces, unless they come swimming up close. are a blur of piggy-pink and ice-
cream. In the street, she doesn’t know, cannot be certain when to smile, when to
look away

The teacher is an old spindly man. Grim, out of a Grimm’s tale. Scarecrow hair, thinning. Unsmiling.

The tawny clutch appeared

on high-heeled evenings only,

slept in a nest of white tissue.

She only speaks to me these days
through groaning floorboards in the night
and slammed doors.

No-one has seen a ghost while breast-feeding
despite the unearthly hours, the half-light

mad sing-song routines of rocking a child
back to sleep.

The furniture covered in once
transparent now foggy sheets
craft the room a morgue, and we
identity the bodies