#yannick murphy

If caught wearing white and you stain, stand and spread out your skirt, let the boys read into it shapes like blots of ink.

Get the moon to phase with you. The tide to lap at your door. Call it Rose or Aunty, but never what it is.

Her fingers are still cool, like ivory on piano keys and they are that pale and he looks at her face, drawn and pale too.

We dream of him and in the morning we tell each other our dreams where he is living with us again, fixing salads, whistling, standing in doorways. Our mother tells us there was a time before they thought to marry when he wrote her every day, long letters with a date and a time in the upper right corner, the hour always late and the pages sometimes stained purple by wine that had spilled as he lifted the glass and drank while he wrote . . . Our mother says not to throw the letters out, they are all that's left of the love she'll never feel again.

I can't imagine walking down the city street, the grit from what my heels kick floating up between my legs, settling in crevices I'd later have to wipe, seeing the speckles of the city on my toilet tissue.

She has pens filled with ink and some that are plumed. Slippers sewn with gold thread and pointed toes. Gum smelling of leaves. Oil in wax-sealed jars. Says "no" as a question after her sentences. Pedals backward to brake on a bike that only brakes by hand. Eats steak with a knife like it was a fork. Looks skyward for the grace of God. Digs in a garden with shards of broken bowl. Calls dogs with the clap of her hands. Trims her nail with a blade. Twists her hair and burns the broken, frayed ends. Rubs her teeth with hollow grass blades in the morning and night. Wears skirts that are scarves knotted at the hip. Writes in a leather-bound book. Totes a cat on her shoulder . . . Joins children at games in the street, throwing off her shoes and hiking up her dress, letting the girls try her perfume kept in a vial, applied with a stick to the small beating veins at their necks. She gives them names they have never heard before and tells them they are words for tree, sky, and lake in a country where the girls never bathe but are licked clean by cows.

. . . she looks at herself, at her bloodshot eyes, the small veins like red scattered roads and branching streams.

She looks like what fishermen don't want after hours spent cutting debris out of their nets.