I would argue

I would still be

arguing

as I stepped off the kerb, stepped into

a truck

bearing down

its tyres screech for me

its wheel-flesh burns

its brakes ache and break but always

you between me

between me

and death

your arm holds me back

holding back, straight and safe, your arm

curbs

and I would do

anything to reach you

to be

with you now

to yank you back to safety

I would kill

myself

anyone, anything, I would roll right over

any body

in my way

if I had my way

– screeching tyres, loss

shrieks –

I would run right over

any object, run right

to you: through

you holding on, holding fast

bearing all

In the laundry we found a postcard

Victorian erotica

a woman with blancmange buttocks and

a tentative smile

like her

malleable curves, bovine

eyes: a Gibson

girl, in sepia tones, her body

all graceful billows, as

rich as her husband’s wheatfields

her breasts, white as orchards in bloom

heavy

featured honey-lips and now

decades later, her country child

wades through pock-coral tidal pools

compulsive

he still finds relics

of a ship smashed by the bay

shards of pottery

pitted like daguerreotype

shattered, once-sharp edges smoothed

now aged, in submarine silence

he assembles the fragments for

mantelpiece display – a voyeur

caressing

he holds them with the tenderness

of her remembered

touch

My grandmother, in the kitchen,

is talking to herself.

‘I had a friend called Alice,’

she intones, low voiced.

‘My friend called Alice baked bread;

she baked bread, ever day,

She was ill, and never told anyone

(I never told anyone

this, but she never did.)

Then she died, and nobody worried

no one had worried, she never

told anyone – so,

nobody ever did.’

My grandmother, in the kitchen,

keeps talking, telling herself. She says

she had a friend called Alice – she

says this baking bread, her daily bread –

and I know she never did.