Читать книгу The Unmapped Woman - Abegail Morley - Страница 9

Not until after the front door slams shut

and absence sucks air from its cheeks

do the words in her head, packed tight

as if on postcards, unhook their ink.

She knows their sloping script by rote,

has read each one to the echo of her womb,

laid her palm on her belly as she read them

aloud. She said, Cessation, cessation,

second trimester, over like a chant as if

wood fairies found a loophole in time,

wound arms and legs from blades of grass,

tugged saplings for spines, wove slews

of apple blossom into hair. And for the heart ‒

she can barely breathe now ‒ the heart comes

from the stunned corpse of a doe, bulged

like late-summer fruit. She heaves herself

across fields, rubs rain-creased dock leaves

on her left thigh, shuffles past cows

flogging milk into machines, breathing

slow-flung air in sharp plumes. For one

unbridled moment she thinks she can run

through buckled nettles, the barbed thickets

of brambles, straggle shoulder-high thistles

all the way down the lane and never

come back to her silent grey world. But she

remembers the locksmith, his dreamt-up

names for keys, how you can half-turn them

in the nuzzle of a lock and nothing will open.