‘Brazilian’

She visits monthly. Always asks for

me, even though I’m the youngest.

Says her boyfriend likes her smooth.

She wants to talk. She lifts

her skirt. Bruises dark on fake-tan

thighs. ‘The weather’s nice,’ she says.

Finding C again

Because you have to start somewhere

Clarissa showed him middle C. ‘There.’

She pushed his finger onto it.

A familiar note. ‘Now you try.’

Her thoughts returned to a wonderful

night when he’d played her Debussy.

Buried

 

Behind Bertram’s Wax Works there are

three large bins of old exhibits,

props, models, wigs all awaiting disposal.

Costumes and trimmings. Seersucker and lace.

It’s a place you’d barely notice

an arm extending from the pile.

 

 

 

 

Empress

Cleopatra turned up in first-year Classics,

as spectacular as her royal namesake.

I imagined myself her Mark Antony

but I was merely Cleopatra’s pearl.

She held me out, dropped me

and watched as I dissolved away.

From a cliff above the breakers

Point Despair. Great name that is.

Someone must have really hated it.

Typical, my family takes holidays here.

‘Fishing’s good.’ ‘Peace and quiet, too.’

Yes. Isolation. It has its advantages.

No one disturbs me. For once.

Downstream

 After the first drops the deluge.

With riverbanks breached, water starts spreading.

Felix carefully packs Melissa’s best things,

placing them into a dinghy he

launches on the floodwaters, before calling.

‘Her stuff’s coming down, you bastard.’

Going to ground

Elli was a gardener. She knew the score. No one ever planted a tree thinking further ahead than its sapling strength; its lush maturity. No one ever anticipated the withering, the succumbing to disease. The time when the beauty of younger, healthier plants around about called attention away from denuding branches. That was when the garden altered so much the old tree became close to invisible. After invisibility only the toppling remained. All that was left was to fall. To be cut into convenient lengths. To be carted away. And, because the tangle of old roots that remains prevents new growth coming through, the grinding out of the stump. Elli knew the score.

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