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ARTS AND CULTURE

Canary in a nursing home

  • 31 July 2012

Canary in a nursing home

Suddenly, as if he had droppedfrom the stave

of a tree,this bright

mellifluous notenow balances on a scale

of perches. He is a blitheuntameable thing,

this thing he cannot name,dancing

at the back of his mindlike narcissi

or flittinglike the arrhythmia

of his heart.At times the music

holds him stilland a jonquil light

beams through two pinholesin his brain

singingof a caged soul.

 

The white room

The room she gives meis at the top of a rickety stairand an arthritic floorboard awayfrom her own.

I must not sleep with her son,not under this roof.My fiancé has his childhood roomwhile I am entombed

inside these white wallswhere a former girlfriendasphyxiated in her sleepon her own vomit.

Is this my penancefor marrying her son?I must not show her my tears.I must arrange my face,

smile as I say my goodnightseven as I need the haemal warmthof his skin, the thrum of his heartin my ear.

When the door closesit seals me off as completelyas an air-lock in a prison wing.Sleep is a gentle mistake

that I make without knowing.I dream of my motherresting on the foot of my bedbefore I am wrenched from sleep.

In a heartbeat the lightreveals the printof someoneon my quilt

and a flicker in the curtainlike a heart's missed beats:the moth frantic, nettedbetween two worlds.

 

Reality

Imagine dayand night

the sky inverted,its dome pushed out

and the Southern Crossfrosting the earth.

Our heaven would begreen as this sea,

our moonthe dangling filament

of an angler fish,our sun

a lost cargoof bullion.

And treadingon angels,

the stars in our hair,we would still

pump shitinto 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. 

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