The Camel
Christmas again, Jesus, another one. London’s East End. her heels stab the wet pavement like they’re trying to kill it, clack-clack, clack-clack, some secretary’s last fuck-you to the day. everybody running for the Underground or the pub, same difference, heat, noise, cheap beer that tastes like rust and lament. peanuts in cloudy glasses, napkins soaked
The Funeral
forty-five years on, and the memory blows back through my skull like smoke from a tailpipe. that day rushing in. a breeze pushing cherry blossoms around the churchyard. petals swirl down on the stone. soft. useless. the incense finds my nostrils. a thin grey ghost of smoke curls up from the wick of a candle.
Jacobs Ladder
the hubcaps keep dropping off this old crate of mine. circling the same grey industrial stretch, day after day, Trafford Park. sharp turns. low brick walls. loading docks smeared with old grease. the hubcaps go without warning, those cheap silver discs spinning free of the rusted clips, rolling off into the noon glare while the
The Corpse Flower
she told me this years later, near the end, in the small warm room where she kept her pressed flowers under glass. a botanist all her life, fluent in the Latin of things that bloom and things that poison. her hands were still precise, even then. she’d loved, and travelled, and lived a good deal
The Steaming Beast
Spring. new blossoms force their way open across the garden after the dead winter. the air has the first thin smell of lilacs and the promise of tomatoes. across the patch of turned earth, the beast is cooking. steam rises thick and sour from the middle of it, a slow furnace of rot where the old waste