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In coffee spoons
(nod to T.S Eliot)
Love is
a half-drunk blue bottle
of wine bending the world
round its neck,
the lick of alcohol's finger
streaking the rim of my glass.
You gave me
a tickle in my throat,
words stick to my grooved
palette like bread,
blushing bruise
on my neck, a pinch
of teeth that has let
blood to my skin,
lips rolling sorry,
you an oak shoulder
in a neat square mirror,
in a neat blue-white bathroom,
a chapped thumb
rubbing
the bruise back into its vein;
the mug I let you use
in the morning
is chipped like a tooth.
My mother after the first husband
(not my father)
There's a picture of her moving on,
flat-stomached as if
she had not just pulled her bloody legs
out of the stirrups, left her stain
on a table in Jordan after my sister was born.
She was
the mother that would never return,
a pounding blue bulge
like a berry beneath one eye,
her body leant on red stone,
blue dress, buckle-shoes
and a new bag of old things so heavy
the soft turquoise inside
of her elbow stretched to pleats-
at seven I thought with a bag so round
why couldn't she carry her child in it?
The one that died on her father's lap,
water-thick lungs, opaque eyes,
everything half-formed; like my mother,
that child could not breathe with him.
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