Neon blue punctuates
the black silence. Siren screams
exclaim fast breaths in the silver
frame, gasps through dilated
night-glass. Raised blinds
are startled brows before they close
like eyes to fade out
the suffocated screeches into
nameless crimes.
The sun sets at five in November, lighting
the afternoon a sickly orange. Specks
of dust cast faint shadows,
drifting noiselessly. Skulls
of dandelion seeds.
The day yawns
drawn-out and slow. A comfortable
buzzing fly lands to rest
on the slouched and speckled
bananas fruit bowled next to me.
Gran’s bones tick
as she picks
at her toenails.
The nipped at nail flicks
away. Clicks metronome
regular. Counts strict seconds.
Under my nail,
a loose armchair stitch.
Dirty cream cotton thread
frayed and puckered like
skin around a half-healed wound
being unpicked-picked-picked-picked.
You pose amongst thirsty relatives,
their faces vibrant and ruffled
with Elizabethan collars, shouting
their colours. In a dry pot, split
as desert sands, parched
like lips, you statue yourself.
Your bloated crux beneath your creased
sheath keeps your reserves
alive. Camel hump. You mime at me,
holding your right-angled
arms as if at pistol point,
screaming with a shock
of spines. You want
to be heard and you try so hard
through the saturated
hues, the reds, the pinks,
the purples, the blues.
I discover love when you slide down my throat.
In a gulp I am yours, teeth-stained, tongue-tied, potioned
in your perfume, your nuances, your notes of fruit,
you lay the root in that warm wave through my spine, woven
loose to make my mind unwind and change,
my vision blur over with that rose tint. I wrap myself
around you, grapevined. You slur and rearrange
the words I say. My tongue, draped in velvet-purple, swells
as the clam’s mouth around its pearl. My head
is clogged with the thickness of you. Full-bodied
and aged you clot my saliva with your red
oak bulk that weighs me down, makes me groggy.
I lick your claret bead from the glass rim as a shade of pink
blossoms in my cheek. Holding you in my palm, I drink I drink I drink.
She wakes up at 6am everyday. She wakes up at 6am thinking about eggs and toast while her husband is still asleep next to her. She thinks about the scrambled eggs and buttery toast that she will make on the clean-metal morning-hob. Make but not eat.
She thinks, staring at the clean ceiling through dirty morning-eyes, about the scrambled eggs and buttery toast with red sauce that she will make for her double-chinned husband who is still asleep in the bed. The bed that she has lifted her folded morning-body out of to turn left. Left out of the bedroom door, down the hallway and left into the kitchen.
Left, down, left. Kitchen. Dum, dum, dum. Ding.
She doesn’t want to think how much she’d rather be in bed, dead to the world, doesn’t want to think of her stubble-covered husband asleep, asleep and waiting for the smell of scrambled eggs and buttery toast. She wishes she could wake up to that muddled, alluring aroma of scrambled eggs and buttery toast and not the thought of it. The thought of it that is so heavy on her head as she lies, almost dead to the world at 6am, in bed. Heavy on her head as if three slices of toast, warm and crusty, were slapped on her face like headstones as she opens her eyes.
She wishes she could be back in bed, cosy-warm, dead to the world. She wishes she could be back in bed and not in front of the hot hob, leaning on the granite grey counter top in her granite grey dressing gown. She is stood in her granite grey dressing gown in her granite grey kitchen, stirring the yellow egg mixture into a yellow morning-mush for her still-asleep husband. She grinds grey-black pepper into it. The specks of pepper look like the freckles she imagines a little boy would have. Freckles spotted over his happy morning-face. She stirs the eggs and freckles with her stiff left hand. She looks at the wooden spoon – the wood is greying, becoming dull, from use – in her left hand, thinks of dying trees bathed in sunlight, yellow eggy sunlight.
She thinks she’d rather be dead… dead to the world – and warm – than stood thinking of ashen trees, stood in her granite grey kitchen in her granite grey dressing gown with cold feet and a hot face. She thinks of dying trees bathed in sunlight, sunlight that is swimming down from the left, through a gap in the canopy. Hot sunlight. She sweats mildly from her hot face that is now wet with sunlight, sunlight that is peaking through the sky-light to her left. She sweats, thinks of her cold feet on cleaned morning-floor, cold feet from the charcoal tiles that she washes with bleach and yellow lemon-soap at night. Cold feet from the tiles that are now awash with sunlight that peaks through the hard, grey sky, peaks through the sky-light gap in the ceiling to make her face, but not her feet, hot.
She hates the sun. The sun is like a petulant child, an egg-yolk, she thinks, cracks on the floor and spreads like glue. The light that peaks through the sky-light on her left makes her hair glow dully, a dull sheen like granite. Her hair is growing grey at the roots, grey like the sacks under her dead-eyes. She thinks how the yellow of the scrambled eggs used to be the yellow of her hair. She thinks how the eggs she cracks into the same morning-frying pan, on the same morning-hob, in the same granite grey morning-kitchen are leaching the yellow from her hair. How the smell that is now steaming from the pan is drawing the colour from her, from her hair.
She hears her husband cough. She puts the toast in the grey-metal toaster. She leans on the granite grey counter top. She thinks how she is turning into the granite grey of this counter top that her receded-hair-line husband bought so she could be happy.
She thinks how she is turning to ash stood in this granite grey kitchen. She is in her dressing gown as she hears her husband yawn, stretch and get out of bed. She takes the headstones of toast out of the toaster and butters them. She is in her dressing gown as her husband walks left out of the bedroom door, down the hallway and left into the kitchen, as she places his plate next to his paper on the greying wooden dining table.
She wishes she could be dead to the world and not stood watching her husband eat the scrambled eggs and buttery toast that she made but cannot eat. Made but can never eat. He shovels the yellow egg in to his mouth loudly. He says nothing, chews the toast, bites down carnivorously. She watches him chew and she chews the inside of her cheek as if it were egg and toast. She images her saliva is butter. He finishes eating, coughs, yawns, roughly kisses her on the cheek as she puts his jacket on his back. He coughs, yawns and turns right, left, down the hallway and out of the front door.
She stands over the table. There are crumbs around the clean plate. Her stomach rumbles through her dressing gown. She thinks how much she would rather be in bed than stood in her granite grey kitchen in her dressing gown. Stood in her grey dressing gown that is granite grey but not made of granite. Her dressing gown is not made of granite. She tells herself that she is not made of granite.
We holidayed in Norfolk, walked
on seaside hills, my mum, gran, aunt and I.
We sat in a café, watched the tide
get high upon the shore.
My sandals were clustered with wet sand
from the beach where I looked out to the waves
and asked are they swans mummy? The peaks,
the crashes of water were white,
they dot dot dashed in little white
windswept plumes upon the sea.
The white seagulls swooped to catch
chips from the floor and sat on the seawall
squawking – ska ska ska – before flapping back to the sky
to shit on the man outside in a baseball cap, eating
a sausage butty on white bread. That seagull’s
wings looked like a feathery white boomerang
blending with the white overcast day, the greying horizon,
the grey sea, the white waves.
The wind was harsh and stung
my face – my father striking me.
The sea shhhhouted and shhhhushed
at the sea wall, they met and collided
and crashed. Everything moved
but the floor, the sea wall. The concrete
was sad and felt so large
next to the hills, the long-walk peaks
that were bent-backs when I looked up into the sky.
I ate nice hash browns in the café.
I sipped milky tea from my kiddy cup.
I showed mum the scar on my finger,
she kissed it better.
of a small boy clothed in paisley harem pants
and rainbow suspenders, suspended
in sepia-toned time –
of a small boy hiding
in a wash basket, held inside it
an egg in it’s cup or a cat
in it’s cradle –
a baby photo with baby
cradled in mother’s arms, it’s feline tongue
testing new air, lapping it up. Milk –
there is the young boy in stilettos that are tall
black and too big, he stands, Bette Davis
with a boa of silk scarves around his neck
like unravelling VHS tape. Here
is the photo of the boy unravelling the VHS tape
he is entangled in the lacquered black
VHS tape, he chews it and touches his foot.
I look at the photographs –
I see my mum in one that is discoloured,
been felt time and time again
by grubby hands. She is flinging
paint at a wall, baby-blue, the boy
is knelt longingly beside her
making hand-prints, baby-blue, on the wallpaper,
on the weathered floor boards, on the white door
where we measured my height till I was seventeen.
I
I don’t have a dad.
Haven’t had one since I was two.
It was a tumour in the heart
that took him away.
I like to think I remember his face,
it’s chunky roundness and the smile
he had, the happiness plumping his cheeks. Mum says
the last time I saw him he smiled and kissed
my forehead, I was two and he is gone. He
is sitting in the frame near the glass clock
in the lounge, smiling and holding me
as an infant. His eyes are protective,
gazing at me as if I was expensive,
as if I wasn’t going to die one day.
I put flowers on his grave
once a week, pink anthuriums, vibrant hearts,
I replace them if they wilt,
if they lose colour.
I do have a dad,
in the ground, in that frame.
II
I don’t have a dad.
Haven’t had one since I was two.
It was a selfish lust that took him,
that keeps him.
I suppress the face that has never smiled, the mouth
that never even forces a friendly laugh,
the lips that never arch at the ends –
except for once – uncomfortably – in the one Christmas photo –
I nod and remember
Mum says I am so proud of you
I nod and I remember the 18th Birthday card message,
the flimsy thing from Clintons, the solitary
from Dad
the sixty-nine pence sticker stuck on the front –
I nod and I think of that photo from 1994 –
I am an infant I am in his arms my head is looking up to him –
his head is turned away from me – trained devotedly on the TV –
the photo is filmy and turning brown with abandoned age –
I keep it in a box that will burn when he dies.
I do have a dad,
biologically.
I saw a car crash today.
It plunged bonnet first
into a traffic bollard like a blind
horse falling into bramble – flipped
on it’s side – face and snout
torn on the tarmac.
Time held me still:
the scabbed wheels
stared me out as they reeled
round the road-edge,
the windscreen was broken –
a burst knee-cap –
it’s contents on concrete, done in
and dredged out. A smell filled
the road, an odour of open
wounds, a bouquet of burnt
rind and rubber. A bloke
wearing blue overalls
and a scattered face rang
the police.
I walked on unfazed
by catastrophe. I thought how the warmth
of my hand, my wrist, was all blood
how breath clouds cold air
how the sky was cerise.
I cut you into sections, eight
or twelve, depending how mean I feel. I dissect
you, skin on. Flesh off when I bite
into you like a sixteen-ounce steak.
The knife I use is wet. I tongue the flat edge.
Your juice stiffens on my skin, sticks
to my hands that are filth. I am young
again. I place your pieces
in a round against a white china plate,
a round like applause; like a stage.
I saw my first play the day my uncle wore
your skin in his mouth as teeth. I remember
laughing at the sweet citrus taxidermy. I remember
being fed you as a child – holding you
like little spheres of happy fire.
The play was a pantomime, something about
ugly ducklings. I watched in awe and sipped your juice
from a cardboard carton. I remember seeing one of the ducks
outside afterwards, still feathered still
made-up, with a cigarette in hand. I remember
wanting a photo and I remember that he didn’t,
hunching his signet back
My life ain’t a play love. I screamed in the street.
I ate you in sections when I got home.
by a.w. vann 