Canary in a nursing home
Suddenly, as if he had dropped
from the stave
of a tree,
this bright
mellifluous note
now balances on a scale
of perches. He is a blithe
untameable thing,
this thing he cannot name,
dancing
at the back of his mind
like narcissi
or flitting
like the arrhythmia
of his heart.
At times the music
holds him still
and a jonquil light
beams through two pinholes
in his brain
singing
of a caged soul.
The white room
The room she gives me
is at the top of a rickety stair
and an arthritic floorboard away
from her own.
I must not sleep with her son,
not under this roof.
My fiancé has his childhood room
while I am entombed
inside these white walls
where a former girlfriend
asphyxiated in her sleep
on her own vomit.
Is this my penance
for marrying her son?
I must not show her my tears.
I must arrange my face,
smile as I say my goodnights
even as I need the haemal warmth
of his skin, the thrum of his heart
in my ear.
When the door closes
it seals me off as completely
as an air-lock in a prison wing.
Sleep is a gentle mistake
that I make without knowing.
I dream of my mother
resting on the foot of my bed
before I am wrenched from sleep.
In a heartbeat the light
reveals the print
of someone
on my quilt
and a flicker in the curtain
like a heart's missed beats:
the moth frantic, netted
between two worlds.
Reality
Imagine day
and night
the sky inverted,
its dome pushed out
and the Southern Cross
frosting the earth.
Our heaven would be
green as this sea,
our moon
the dangling filament
of an angler fish,
our sun
a lost cargo
of bullion.
And treading
on angels,
the stars in our hair,
we would still
pump shit
into our air.
Louise McKenna's first manuscript, A Lesson in Being Mortal, was published by Wakefield Press in 2010. Since then she has had work published in journals such as paper wasp and Poetrix. Louise is at present co-editing the next Friendly Street Poets anthology, due to be published by Wakefield Press in 2012.