Poetry

i. Rahim Oh my son Let my love cushion the weight of your head. Let me take your hurt      I will hold it while you rest I will fold it into my body. Sleep, my angel, my flower, my brave, sweet boy. [Child with extreme hydrocephalus—deformity of face, body and ear—and defects of…

My first steal: an ice-pop, coaxed from the cornershop freezer and lifted: a brittle, syrupy limb that fused—beneath my shirtsleeve—onto my skin. Second, a tidy slice of apple strudel (cadged behind the café proprietor’s back). Its fudge of apples branded my pocket with a bloom of grease. Years on, the shoes: size eight men’s brogues….

She says it’s haven’t, not ent. Miz Jezameen Henacre wears long-tailed gloves spilled over her skinnies like milk froth. She fears palm-skin maybe, its thinness. She teaches me how to say her name, sharpen the een. She totters her bell skirts, her own self, here from the Mission house midway through Sundays, when our floor…

a little one, drab, barely skyborne, with nothing of the gut-unraveling acumen of the scavenger                 this is Jackself limping across marshland, making a decoy of himself, piping up when the day goes dim, so close to the ground he’s almost it      small wonder Peewit is the name the other boys have given him, not Jackdaw, not…

Lately, I see through a narrow chink in a stairgate. I see doors and think: can I get my pram through that? In the park, I dole out small snacks— ricecake, popped grapes, elven cheeses. If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would be infinite but I have closed us up in stacky cups,…

When my mother says I was her kit taken from her too early, I think not of cats but a wolverine, my devourer of snowfields, who, when she can find no more prey, eats herself, even the frozen bones. I crawl down the black phone line as if it’s an umbilicus to the last refuge…

Her gaze is tipped with curare, her face farouche from the kids’ asylum where ice baths failed to tame her. Her claws are crescent moons sharpened on lightning. She swims through the star-splinters of a mirror and emerges snarling— my were-Mama. She’s a rainforest in a straitjacket. Where she leaps the sky comes alive, unleashed…

1. Picture my mother as a baby, afloat on a waterlily leaf, a nametag round her wrist— Victoria amazonica. There are rapids ahead the doctors call “mania.” For now, all is quiet— she’s on a deep sleep cure, a sloth clings to the cecropia tree, a jaguar sniffs the bank. My mother on her green…

What with the pogroms, the genocide, the ethnic cleansing, the secret massacres, the mass graves, the death camps, the public executions, at last there was nobody left, the country was empty. Survivors who reached the borders became refugees. Rebuked by that silence beyond the mountains, the victors planted willows and in due course the country…