Poetry

Even now, I still rememberthe pleading briberyin my mother’s eyes as she held outthe piece of silver in her palm— A way figured out of the stressof taking me down to Georgetownto see the England-princessin my unfinished dress. “Which you prefer, to see the princess,or a Whole Shilling for yourself?”At six years old I took…

On the outskirts of Reykjavik I find myself slapping the assof a thick-piled Viking horse,sending up a plume of dust and gas that all but obscures the scrawlon parchment of a jet plane, sending up a pallthe likes of which I don’t recall since a ruseI pulled on my mother. This one involved my fatherlying…

I am downstairs early looking for something to do when I find my father on his knees at the fireplace in the sitting room sweeping ash from around and beneath the grate with the soft brown hand-brush he keeps especially for this. Has he been here all night waiting to catch me out? So far…

           after a title by Gillian Allnutt                       I Because the Dear Lord God is both in me& in His Book, my father said,these two must cross. He tasked me daily, under the lantern-clock, each white-clothed afternoon, with heavy words.Which I would…

Would Jane Eyre come to the Information Desk? The speaker voice at Heathrow airport said. I stood and waited for her to appear, Jane Eyre. And when she came near, she was shouting: My name is Bertha; my name is not Jane Eyre I come from Kingston, Jamaica. Look here. Well, they’d placed handcuffs on…

I’ll never forget the wind the corner whispered, nor the windowed darkness that was more a frame for the world’s highrise loneliness. I’ll never forget the days we lingered beneath our fingerprints and how we were each other’s private sacrament. Brooms and mops hung behind doors like secret agents. The crooks of our knees ached…

Way down in Egypt’s land, meaning Memphis, I watched a party waltz the gangplank, preening past a peacock preening on the dock. Antebellum ball-gown frippery complemented Confederate gray, every man a colonel or above, and the ladies pealed flippant imitations of a cavalier past until one sweet peach enfolded in crinoline refused another’s “nigger-lipped” cigarette…

Go, my only friend. I know this voice has lost its wintered savor—my skeptic’s mewling cries fritter out across the sad Atlantic’s no man’s land. If I bury spoons, will you wait for them to bloom? Estrangement—it had seemed so accidental— was with us from the first, a doorjamb fixity. It wasn’t that randoms fingered…

The brim that broke the river came on land. Its skirts were vast from so much rain and made the grass beneath it dance, the wild hair of the drowned. We trailed it onto the road to where a cattle-grid gulped it down and where a hedgehog whirled in its mitten of thorns. Back then,…