Goya's dog
Goya's dog
The singer’s blind
mouth sends blood
to the painter’s hands –
Tio Paquete hears
the snapping
of the aortic valve,
counts the heartbeats,
feels the filling
of slack veins,
salivates
at the straining
jaw sinews, senses
dark paint, in a bar
in the Malasaña,
as the slow sun creeps
across the brush strokes
and a dog-whistle
calls attention to
the ochre wall.
(Published in Brittle Star magazine)
Geography
Geography
When children in woolly hats came out of school
crows rearranged their feathers and perched
high on the traffic lights. Hot sugar smells
oozed from kiosks between the blocks of flats.
Across the river, café staff cleared tables, flushed
out the coffee machine. The river linked places
that had trams and galleries, places where
musical scales were practised and fashionable
shoes scraped against heavy cobbles. Ministries
were alive with digital paperwork and video calls.
Now the ministries’ flags hang limp in the vacuum,
their stones weighing heavy on the bedrock
during the inertia of winter. In a square,
one of the children almost looks. She once
had sparkly pink varnish on her tiny nails.
She and her mother must have smiled
while they waited for it to dry. The crows
seem unsettled these days, blinking white lids
across their black eyes. They fly over frozen fields
to gather at the edge of the city.
(Published in Wildfire Words)
Wooden house
Wooden house
You remember the arc of the road,
the half-shut gate, the wobbly slabs,
the key that sticks in the lock.
You remember the squeak
of handles, the creak of hinges,
feet on the dark waxed floor,
the other rooms, without murmurs
and coddled babies, the soft rind
of nursing; spaces for dust motes
where the aching house groans.
Drawers wedged through disuse
are too intimate now. Browning
receipts and forgotten letters are fossils
on the desk. The blackened arms
of a favourite chair feel cold.
Sweetness clings in a memory
of warm neck folds, curdled and lost.
(Featured in Kirsten Adkins' film Singing a Wooden House)
