Open category

Framed

Because he had a large growth on his neck they called him
Dinny of the unborn twin and the worst of them asked 
if he ever voted for labour. When the ships came in 
there were containers to lift with the new- fangled thing-uma- 
jig that took away the jobs of fourteen dockers. Once 
a smallish wooden pallet that got sent the wrong way from 
Guyana. Pineapples, smelling to high heaven. The scent of 
the Caribbean, though we argued about whether Guyana 
was South American or part of the Anglo-Carib proper. 
Sparks who had BBC World Service said it was; he’d heard 
a long-boat-man from there tell how they roasted coconuts 
on fires till they burst with the heat of their milk, making a 
splatter that they ate all up, washed off the stickiness in 
the tide. But there was a reason to begin this… yes, the 
question of the unborn and the rights of same. Well, we 
brought Dinny in, all scrubbed up, to the minister. Frame 
was his name, from somewhere down west where they’ve 
those long towns built toward the worship hall and they’re 
trained to stare straight and to think straight. Reverend, 
we said, there’s a growing boy out the back of this man’s neck 
and we think, as you are the upstanding and the outstanding 
you should now stand up for the rights of the yet to be born 
and get it out for us, yes, get it out. Well, he’s still looking at us 
with one eye forlorn as a burnt out tree and the other whipped 
clean to the whiskey. We turned him that day, it’s true as god, 
and he left for Scotland once the spring came in and didn’t even 
have a farewell do for his leaving. Somewhere in the outer or the 
inner Hebrides they say, there’s a squinter of a man who was 
once of the cloth and his crossing is and his crossing was and 
his crossing always will be forever and ever

Domonic

This time of year I think of you the most:
springtime, when I'm in love with everything.
Behind the bar you liked on Candlemaker Row

the kirkyard laburnums are budding;
come the summer they'll be yellow Texas hairdos
dropping pods of blossom on the old graves.

I'm amazed that I still observe the days
since you went wherever you went;
that I still want to tell you things.  Like:

I look for you in crowds of out-of-towners,
and in spring sometimes there'll be a man
who makes me pause, heart spilling its blooms.

But there was only ever one of you,
born with a misspelled name even Google
corrects.  Like: see?  I'm searching.  

Like: I've learned there are collectors who want
only broken things – porcelain so loved that
when it smashed, the cracks were sealed with gold.

That's how I was broken by your going:
although it was a wrecking, it was also
a making-better.  Like: thank you.

Like: what I'd choose to do with you right now
is go to the bar in the big white afternoon,
no one else drinking, the window seat a giftbox 

of jewelled light. Laburnum light: amber
in the tall glasses lit up like bulbs.  And after,
I could walk away, every break and closure glowing.

Glass Eye

The real one lost to the North Sea
or so we were told. You served on submarines –
I imagine you in the dark, a long way down,
listening for that echoing ping. You would stab
at our fingers with a fork when we tried to pinch
food from our plates; our mother’s clench
at that blinkered stare we forgot most of the time.
You carried a wad of rolled up notes and bought me
my first LP: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
And when we left for good you cried so hard
you had to take out your false teeth.
Our mother was amazed, she had never seen
you cry before. You found it hard to smile: a strangled
grimace as if a genie would forever be released.
And when you trimmed the rabbit’s claws,
outside one afternoon on a sweltering day,
you pushed your glasses up on your nose: sweating,
clipping, snipping – you went on,
ignoring our pleas, all protests – blood, red in its fur,
but we could see you wanted to stop.