Agoloso Presents - Atondido Stories Agoloso Presents - Mama Mada | страница 187

Mama Mada
Ship’s Desk
by Sarah Sibley
I could have been flung overboard with smoke floats,
not detained at port without explanation.
I imagine the bottom of the ocean,
the torment of tentacles tugging on my nestled drawers
while plankton swish through keyholes.
On solid ground, there’s not the comforting creak of the ship’s bowels
but they found me a relative’s house
that likes to stretch its oak beams and wooden floors.
I’m not your great granddad’s anymore.
I’m for phonebooks, the bank folder, the hole punch.
I smell of absent keys and warm money
not of salt and sweat and changeable weather like you’d expect.
Her Grown-Up Dress by Pam Th o m p so n
When she came at last to that row of shops
on the long road, having left behind the dirt track,
railway-line, the sluggish brook and had fastened
round gold slides in her mud brown hair,
pulled plimsolls on her feet so the backs weren’t squashed
she found the shops were boarded up, that the woman
standing there wore a pale green cotton dress
and when the tall young man stepped from shadows
of a sealed-up shop the woman’s face was like a pearl
whose lustre lasted all the time she held his arm
and walked slowly down that long road which trains
hadn’t crossed for years, where the brook was dry,
and the cotton dress was just a stem stripped down,
its milk pale sap evaporating in air,
and the young man a tree it had briefly leaned against.
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