kiln

fifteen years old, school bag bending
her back, she watches her childhood
burn. the storm-eyed bears and
rounded, plump-cheeked girls, tumbling
from regiment to ruin in the blackened
echoes of her fantasy.
the patent leather shoes are swallowed next,
the photographs and paintings, the
pine cones rising forgotten from the sand
of some holidayed beach and screaming, a
descant to the raw heat that can only be
preparing to take her too.

letters spread their wings from a table
that folds into its own reflection, the
makings of tea and darned stockings
already painted into its surface like
melting silk, like watercolour and shrivelled
canvas and her father’s latest project. the
lovers bleed from their place set in ink,
hidden somewhere between sonnet and
secret conversation. afterthoughts, phrases she
never thought to finish, tumble from the
parched edges to hover, just for a second,
within the trembling dust then
dissolve.

the relic of a newspaper announces the opening
of a new barber and air raid shelter in
the same breath as she counts out years
into the billowing smoke.
a catalogue of her ages dances across
her vision: the dreadful pleated skirt, the
cotton blouses, the dance dress she
stitched herself from her grandmother’s
pattern, plunge in canon into the cabaret
unfurling before her and vanish, waving
farewell in muslin and puffed sleeve and
bias cut.

the glossy edge of a cover girl, winking
in all the shades of her outrage, furls up
into damsel and distress.
a radio crackles, whistles a lullaby as it
rocks itself to sleep. She snatches it amidst
scarlet and gold, clutches aerial to her chest,
shrouds her ears in broadcast and dying
signal, desperate to hear anything but the
song of the sirens churning her stomach and the
bitter hum of her own heartbeat.

in the tangled limbs of the sky,
the planes still soar
overhead, trailing an elegy of shrapnel and
broken heart, the success of their mission
carrying them home to someone else’s
motherland.