white
clean shaven
aged 36
5ft 8ins
Pizza in hand, he’s grazing towards Salamander
Street, though graze will be too pastoral a word
for the rip of what he’s going to bite up.
She’s selling her phosphorescence down there
among the industrial units. She’s scared
and she should be, even though
the moonlit grass of Leith Links is just
a street away, and the police might come by
to keep an eye on the working girls they’ve relocated
to the new red light tolerance zone. Papers,
plastered against window bars, struggle and flap
as a tough breeze siphons from the west,
empty crisp packets head east along the canyon
of Salamander Street, edgy in the dense hush
of the warehouses. She kicks litter
off her ankles. How could anyone imagine
she likes all this; the lubricated thrust,
the disgust, the paltry cash in hand?
She stands across from the tile centre,
thinking of the sandwich she’ll have later,
waiting for the final fuck of the night,
expecting it to be the usual tedious
tap-tapping of her handbag chain against brick.
A taxi stops. The man gets out.
thin build
brown hair
blue jeans
black jacket
My mother dressed me in skin
that became me,
branched me in bone
from her body’s own store,
wove me in wet strings
of crimson and blue.
Earth pulled and I left
my mother’s booming lake,
pushed through her pulse
of grip and give,
hooded in blood,
into the thud
of my own drums,
heart and lungs
and seasons.
Summers when
the skipping rope beat
on the hot playground,
and I jumped,
polka-dotted,
bunchy-frocked,
to the thwack, thwack
and the chanting girls;
Mother’s in the kitchen
doing a bit of stitching,
how many stitches
can she make?
One, two, three, four....
She made five of us
in and out of the the rhythm method,
her girls,
dressed and ready
in flesh and choices,
all our pulses leaping ahead,
carrying our ancient dead
in new patterns;
my mother launched us.