words & pictures
The milk tastes off in wartime Clammy on the tongue Even when you are so distant You can hardly hear the metal bend You make galaktoboureko So thick the shape returns Wondering why Easter Falls in archaic calendars Each year on new days As if martyrdom were inexact in its demands I imagine Medea’s tears In thick and sweet and distilled stains When she learned she ate her young Time Is a wolf, you say And in one deft hand Break another egg
Hang the washing sideways she says with the crucifixion drawl of dust eclipsing a copper beaten sun centurions at hem and sleeve makes a livelier kind of execution the snared bird scrape wrist bone against an enfilading chin decaying like the silver halides of old photographs to a spit-edged, palsied shake an ochre layer to prevent halation (the blistered, liminal glow of blurred mirrors and sun dogged tv screens) laved with the first soft breath of rain in the liquorice blasphemy of her mouth a grit like succour heaving dust-devil exhalations flows across the raw edged bitumen a vine that bears dead crows In efflorescence swerving wrist-break hard the tread marks plain as a slap
