Hiss

Going in when the firefighters left

was like standing on a black beach

with the sea suspended in the walls,

soot suds like a conglomerate of flies.

You kick the weeds and try to piece it back.

Fractured shell? A bone? Bloated antennae?

Flesh thigh spindle, gangrenous pet fish?

An eye or a tiny glaring stone? A seal’s tongue?

Or the sour sinew yoking front and hind fin?

Vertebrae or fetters? Bedsheet or slave skin?

The black is coming in from the cold,

rolling up the beach walls, looking for light.

It will enter you if you stand there,

and spend the rest of its time inside you

asking whatitwas whatitwas whatitwas

in a vivid hiss heard only by your bones.

Washing

The silent crowd gathered by the tree wrapped in ribbons. As it neared eleven, they picked up their buckets and cans of paint and walked around the corner to the station. Inside a woman was tearing skin from her fingers with her teeth. She stared. Someone gave her a yellow cloth and gestured that she stand.

“In Birmingham, there had been a West Indian Christmas party that lasted nine days.”

The silent crowd had brought coca-cola, vinegar, a three-pack of firm toothbrushes, a Henry Hoover.

“I went down to the cafe and played space invaders.”

Beginning in the far corner: three-year-old with a feather duster and her sister with a can of Pledge and their aunty stepping onto the bolted-down bench in her flip-flops to reach the windows and the tall one coiling all the cobwebs with their hands and another changing the flickering bulbs and another pouring water into the cheese plants.

“I think I could have brought plastic cups down in a stack.”

More came, with sage and agarwood and tarot cards and made a tiny altar by the chairs where the bleeding, the roofless, the broken-hearted and the vengeful sat, watching them scrub the floor and the skirting boards, using their gloved nails to pick at the dried muck.

“When the policeman went everything was peaceful, for it was pure youths down there.”

Then the silent crowd opened a tin of paint. They were going to make this very beautiful. When everything was white - even the windows, even the cracked biros provided - they carried in pews and fresh flowers and helped each other change their clothes.

“They asked me about the sound, about the ownership of the sound.”

And when the canon came with his swinging smoke he strode past the crowd to the window where the officer sat, touched the painted glass with his holy fingers, shut his eyes and murmured a blessing. We assume the officer bowed his head.

Stone

autumn

in all its orange dresses sipping rain in Fordham Park

A tyre swing

eclipses the world within its hoop

I have found the stone with the names of all the dead

I sit

and meet the stone’s cold pink mirror