Afterbirth

Split,
like a tomato on a sill,
the juice,
the very fruit of me
bleeds out.

Beached,
like a turkey in a tin,
the bits,
the very giblets of me
pucker

Like the mouths
of experts
sent to scour
my spattered kitchen
shelves

In search
of any known recipe
for my utter lack
of knack
at giving birth.

Violin Lessons

She would sit on the top stair and sob
when Daddy played his violin.
Way past bedtime, no hush, no sanction
could still the saw of her seconds
till he'd carry her down
and fiddle a jig, let her flit about
the parlour like a moth.

She told me this just once
--and I knew not to ask again--
when I walked in on her weeping
with the kitchen radio, discovered
first, finally, that exceptions were made
by Arthur, the wielder, staunch wearer
of collars, who peered from his stern,
silver frame on our mantel
with eyes that could swivel three-sixty.
Who would never miss a trick.
Who would never take a penny.
Who would, quite simply, turn in his grave.

Later, the evidence against Arthur mounted:
Exhibit B, trespassed from her bottom drawer,
same swivel eyes, dazzled, almost, as he stoops
to take her tiny hand in his. I asked him straight;
he answered, soft as sepia, speaking only of love
and of moments of mirth.

So Arthur posed a proper portrait,
his name a knot of cautionary tales.
Nowadays, he troubles me far less
than the violin he left her
it slipped her mind to retrieve
from a repair shop on the quays.

Borrowed light

Peaked and hollowed and ancient as the moon
for the forty years I've known his shy bachelor face
he has pedalled his high nellie through our town
at a pace so exquisitely unhurried
as to defy the very laws of locomotion.

They tell me he had a gardening job
and before my time kept pigeons
he would transport in a basket on his handle bars.
But I never so much as saw him prop the bike
to buy a paper and we youngsters all knew
Mattie would neither give you the chase
nor fish for the begbag of bullseyes.

He offered us only his orbit of our days.
Yet he came to mean much more to me
than an old man and his bicycle:
When I could only stand and blink
as my playfields sprouted lawns and cul de sacs,
he'd cycle past with that cap, that coat,
that same trouser clip, fetch me back
down the dusty summer road
on the sheer recognition of a nod,

So slight, so unremarkable, I never noticed.
Till now he's gone and I see him everywhere.
I close my eyes, watch him wheel before me
like something bright, burnt into the lids.
It's hard, so, to think how he must have dismounted
for death. I prefer to picture him pedalling straight on,
oblivious, as the wheels beneath him finally give up,
buckle, in perfect slow motion. Or perhaps as he dips
down some gentle slope, some slip into the sea
and disappears, sliver by sliver, like the sun,
the waning moon, whose shadow still
follows us home.

^

Biography

Sophie Spalding lives in Dublin's Northside with her husband and two sons. She has recently started writing short stories and poetry and these
are her first published pieces.