1. when you stand in the meadow
looking across, the light lingers
in the trees, soaking
into branches like they are
marking where it happened.

nobody comes here anymore,
I sit inside when I want to get away
from mother’s stillness or Lucy
talking to me like I will always
be the smallest one.
Ivy will grab the walls with
never-let-go hooks, bindweed a
green carpet creeping through cracks
and saplings will spring out
through windows until
I am the only one who remembers.


2. there are times, late at night
my arm shoots into the air;
pick me, pick me, pick --
please, pick me.



3. the front door has already
fallen away from the frame.

He is not here now, but over in
the graveyard. They lowered him in
using two ropes and the reverend
used his special slow voice
that he thinks God can hear.
He kept on and on - insisting he
had been ‘gloriously transformed’

the reverend is a liar.
How can it be glorious, I was
screaming to the grass, when
he's stuck down there being
broken open by centipedes?

IT IS A BLOODY LIE.

besides, I do not want him to be
anything other than what he was.


4. when I wake it is dusk,
the air is cold and I wonder if he will
emerge from the trees.