– 109 –

Tres Pechugas

In this town of sugar skulls, a church designed
by a ten-year-old from an Italian postcard,
Susannah has given up painting altogether.
She mixes papier-mâché, forms creased, yellowing
bodies, staring emaciared heads, naked rib cages.

In this town you can buy tiny silver limbs;
an ear, an elbow, a stretched out hand
to avoid illness. All over her clothes
Susannah stitches them, biting off
crimson thread with her teeth.

Evenings, she walks up Calle Reloj,
three necklaces heavy about her throat.
Past the tortilleria, the shop interior
crème de menthe, with a silver machine
spitting tortillas hot and flat as summer sky.

She buys chicken legs and breasts for her Texan lover,
who, omnipotent belly up, watches CNN and pretends
he's elsewhere. 'Tres pechugas y tres piernas por
favour,' she says with a childish lilt. And the men stare
at her waist cinched in with a gold bead-belt.

Susannah's house is in the old quarter—
and when she enters, the man calling for his dinner
there's a lizard; tongue flickering
a brief candle flame, body a large black seed
against the watermelon walls.

– 110 –

Tepee

I wore only a tight necklace,
shoes, the colour of a rabbit's
inside ear, buttoned over instep.

Sometimes a painted apron
with flowers unfurling,
spark-eyed heads in profile.

I carried my father's offerings:
pallid, hasty omelettes
my mother would not touch,

lemon and mint
she drank in noisy gulps,
painting in the midday sun.

Clay-smudged,
I sat in a manuka tepee.
Voices in my skull, boats bobbing on a river.

When my father left, we made gingerbread people,
molasses-dark and crumbling,
ate them slowly, week by week.

I wore my shoes to bed,
fell asleep to the noise of hens
roosting in the pear tree.

– 111 –

I dreamt my mother was a statue
I followed to all the world's
cities, watched her in piazzas

pigeons pecking grain
from her naked shoulders.
Nearby, an old violinist whose music I could not hear.

Itinerancy

Returned from Mexico he spent all year travelling
between a city terrace with an untidy garden,
and his mother's house in a southern spa town.

A town full of braided sourdough loaves
glass beads and claw-foot baths
of sulphuric water; soft and brown as old tea.

I could never predict when I'd see him
Sometimes recognising him in a queue
or the dreamy-dim of a movie as the credits rolled.

He'd grip my arm with a warm hand,
wrist covered in whorls of dark hair,
spine glowing pale, skin stretched tight.

– 112 –

Always on the way elsewhere,
he'd crack his joints, rotate his head,
trying to settle into his own body.

Once I ate dinner at his house; the other guest
was five years old with a name from The Mists of Avalon.
Night fell and we dressed her in a Che Guevara T-shirt,

tucked her beneath crimson chenille
in a room filled with Frida Kahlo postcards
and reproductions of Flemish Madonnas.

I had an urge to try on his shirts lining the back
wall like an audience. All in a state of disrepair:
frayed cuffs, pearl buttons split.

I wanted to push up his sleeves, inhale river silt
and sandalwood. Instead I wound his hair in tight
rosettes and my fingers came away velvet-slick with oil.

Outside, a plum tree dropped fermenting fruit
and the child slept; her breathing
filling the room: wind through bamboo.

– 113 –

Disclosure

A brocade jacket and stained teeth
lower lip tinged pollen yellow.
He smelt of orange blossom, unwashed hair,
a cumin bitterness. Details of his life resonant
in her body: a shivered song along a crystal glass rim.

Details significant as hoarded childhood
objects: a seahorse intricate,
prehistoric-looking, a rat that had fallen
into a tin of floor varnish,
emerging perfectly preserved.

Gradually it was death he spoke of: his father,
an unborn child. A man he knew,
found after a week with a halo of flies.
Palms tight around a hot tea-glass, knees drawn up,
she realised he spoke obliquely of himself.

When he finally told her, she understood
the desperate energy in his hands,
the way he twisted his hair into buds.
Bones barely impeded by flesh,
skin alive with an itch that never dissipated.

Later, her half-knowledge accused him.
She imagined his face etched in blue-wonder,
thought: Exploration, Whiteheart, Niagra, Hardware
—city lanes littered with syringes. Her hand resting
on the fragile pattern of ribs beneath his shirt.