jolie memphis

alambi

we'll listen to the radio while you make soup,
on a dull monday morning while I nurse a headache
i didn't drink mama I was crying.
feeling blood drip onto the white porcelain
as the rain continues outside

I'll light a candle and think about who she is
she, who is full of nothing, remembering the bathroom upstairs where she tried to do her make up, looking out the sun lit window on that windy morning, at the lambs that followed their mothers, taking in the near spring air, window propped open and she had a peak, holding her brush like a dormant painting, framed in the window of the bathroom upstairs, trying to cry at the sight of newborn lambs, turning away from innocence, and warm wool, pale, excluding her nose, red and sun burnt, as she smudged powder on her cheeks, praying to gods unknown.
the lambs had nestled at their mothers stomachs, skipping creatures near the running stream, and what separates her from them, was the barbed wire and the birch trees, the height of the bathroom upstairs, the glass of the window propped open and on a lock.

monday afternoon has come and I'll pick at the skin of my lips, sitting on the floor beside my bed, grey light streaming in. when I close my eyes, I see the lambs, their noise, the birds tweeting and somehow the sound of sun and spring, the image of the flowerbeds and the vegetable patches where raspberries grow. I know every time I go back there, I can't be happy, the mirrors of that house are too harsh, the memories turned sour as they retreat further into the recesses of my mind. for now I'll keep the image of babies, of animals new and bursting with life in that field. it's thirty six minutes past now and I'm bleeding still, thinking of slaughter, of birth.

when I close my eyes, sleeping that night, now all I see is her. I am suddenly a lamb myself, staring up at a girl framed by a window in a room upstairs in an odd brick house. she's holding a brush and looking at me. I see her hair and her face, pale except for a patch of red on her nose. the girl stays for a while, and then she leaves.