#una mannion

“I wanted to go into the past and say things differently. I wanted to go back and tell him the things I never did or change the things I did say, or say them better. I wished I had called him more when he was alone.”

To all the books I own but haven’t read yet: Una Mannion came out with a new book today so you will all be ignored.

Hello Friends!

They move the earth with small trowels and brushes and all week the seals sing a desolate chorus as if for you. First a small child's foot slow sweeps of the brush across your small bones, your shape in the ditch, taking definition, a slow birth in the corner of the field by the water’s edge. You are lying on your side knees pulled into your chest the thin bones of your arms holding yourself without your hands your heavy head bent low toward your small body, a comma in the earth, like an ultra sound picture of the earth’s womb where you lay crouched for years. Beside your ribcage, a single blue glass bead for your ear a bronze ring, your grave gifts. If flowers and herbs cradled your head, they are dust now. Someone brought you here and laid you down with care your death a secret, your story buried. In the moon bay at the edge of earth where they found you the midden’s shelves layer time, like growth rings. Now is our turn on the surface of time you and your buried bead, prehistory, before there were written words to remember with. A sequence of milk teeth along the bone of your jaw and the buds to permanent ones spell your age. You are eighteen months old. Your bones in the midden are a mystery Iron Age people didn’t bury their dead bodies were left to wind, or wolves or water. But not you. Perhaps touching your cold cheek your mother could not abandon your body to the night and here, where the land juts out toward the sea and the tide moves, a place she might find again, she brought you.