An endless after-dinner speech
and I wait for a pause before returning to my seat.
A porcelain doll waits too.
Her rusty-blue eyes fix on me.
She smiles an immaculate sort of malice.
I don’t know her, but wonder how she died.
“I know your sister,” she says. “I worked with her …
professionally.” I name my sisters, but no and no
and no. She grows impatient, snaps her name.
She leans close. I smell starvation on her breath,
hear a mechanism, no-one could call a heart, thud.
“You see,” she says “I was her therapist.”
A trap – steel crushes my ankles.
I know this race of people, I withdraw into history
to find my sister, take her by the hand and run.
We escape through tall grass in the back meadow,
through a field of dandelion clocks tick-tocking
beside the railway track. Down at the river
we hunker beneath the bridge,
laugh at this bold new adventure.
Too young to own a lexicon for our future,