a bottle top rolls

             to the end of

                       your usual promptitude

                                 misjudging

                                                            the rest of the lonely evening

                                cars in the window compact into a hand clap

                                                               children perform themselves in the glass

                                                      matching

                                                                         so sudden a journey

                                              where every dimension is made shorter

when they turn away from mirrors

                                 chrysanthemums steal

                                                         the route out of the other world

                                                                      everyone checks

                                                                                  what might be done to them

                                 always

                                            always moving towards

                                                                     nothing extraordinary in your language

                                                       in the glass you find

                                                                                        yourself

                                                                                                     on your back

                                                              call it time

                                                                  instead of throwing out

                                                                                     always moving by yellow mirrors

                                                                                                between the arms of you

CUANDO YO ME MUERER

Here, hard grapes are rustling on the vine. There,
they were silent with juice and sweetness. I read Lorca
on the terrace without the words. Here, I have a dictionary
but no Spanish. When I am dead,
bury me, he said, with my guitar in sand.
When I am dead, pick the parts of me
from under the wheels, bury me, if you want
where the silver birch will grow
and show the seasons. When I am dead between
the orange trees and the mint. Between the fuchsia and the end
of the hydrangea, applemint and silver mint have dwindled
to stems where I sit on the terrace
and listen to buses grinding the road beyond the garden.

SEA HOLLY

My father brought eryngium from Woolworth’s
in a plastic bag, the first planting in the unbroken
garden. While they papered trellis over
children's tranfers where the table was to go,
it came in on the weed bed like the tide, blue
from its bottle brush blooms, down the spikes
of its spines to its wrongly festive leaves. The sea,
a  trip to Weston-super-Mare away, washed up
on our pavement, passers-by retracting from
the crackling waves. When all the lingering
lives had been emulsioned from the house,
my mother, craving bedding plants and paving,
watched him dig it up. It was encroaching
on the neighbours, making people look.

SOMETHING TO CALL AN OBJECT

Evading spilt water
on the sill where pollen navigated
the skyline of mistimed flowers at the mercy

of my breath, the first
of us out and looking for something
to call an object, I found the trapezium of a broken

silver birch and I remembered
the dry explosion in the dark, the fractal
of a storm that shredded tendons in the trunk.

Where the mirror was
propped behind nettles, I catalogued
dew on my ankles which was not that day the same

as rain, birds disputing
signs of the weather, the distillation
of honeysuckle in the porch, substitute coffee that smelt

of damp books. Too early,
shuffling notes on the treads, I added
white absences between ascending columns, a moth

smeared on the wall. Pacing,
to settle my features, the spiral of lawn
where growth was saved from the mower, leaving the wind

to dry my face, I discovered
the bundle of leaves and limbs, the pool of sky
behind the nettles, that the fallen tree had turned into a stream.

from RAZOR A story by Jacqui Rowe (to be published in Crowning Glory, edited by Mandy Ross)
    
     I loved it when he got out the razor and slashed into the layers. Then he would slide the blade down the lengths, and, with a virtuoso flourish, twist strands like skeins of silk thread and tap them with the invisibly sharp edge until single hairs melted away into the air.
     It was never enough for me, though.
     “I want it even spikier,” I’d say. “Spikier still,” I commanded, when he showed signs of reaching for the scissors. And as the razor came within a tissue thickness of grazing my cheek, my ears, my neck, I would hold my breath until I felt sick.
     Scissors left hair heavy and blunt, in the neat, lifeless styles sad women chose. As I sat at my desk processing expenses claims, as I waited for Emma at the school gates, as I watched the carrots and celery pass through the checkout, my spear tipped locks told everyone that I was as fearless as a knife-thrower’s assistant.
     I never combed my hair, just grabbed strands randomly with straighteners as hot as I could bear, and dyed it the other side of black. The colour I chose was called Midnight Mystery, and the mystery was why the packet said “permanent” when it rubbed off, leaving a navy blue smear across my pillow.
     “How much do you want me to take off?” Lee would ask at the start of each cut, scissoring the layers through his stubby fingers. “Quite a lot,” I’d say, tentatively. “I can’t believe how much it’s grown.”
     At the start I’d shown him pictures cut from magazines of women with barbed wire, saw-toothed hair, but now I didn’t bother. He knew what I liked, probably guessed it was about process rather than style. He would select a long thin blade from the black pouch they were wrapped in, unfolding it from it its protective sheath. Then he would hold the edge to the light like a duelist choosing his weapon. He never seasoned the anticipation by flicking it up and down a leather strop, as if he was a barber in a melodrama. When I asked, casually, how he kept them sharp, he told me he didn’t; they were disposable nowadays, and each lasted only for two hair cuts before it dulled beyond use.
      “Though you sometimes wear one out on your own,” he said. I went home more proud of that than of my newly done hair, which was much the same as ever.
      Sometimes we would talk, about holidays or a film we had both seen, but that was rare, because I liked fantasy and he was obsessed with real life dramas. Lee’s quiet voice, like his touch, was soothing, but I didn’t have fantasies about him. He was shorter than me and stocky as his hands, with no-coloured hair and eyes.
     “How’s that?” he asked, one day, fanning the spikes out round my face. He didn’t put down the razor while I rubbed away the damp, clipped ends of hair that had adhered to my cheeks and blew them from my lips.
      “My fringe,” I said. “It could be a bit sharper.” Before I’d finished speaking, he was in there with the needle thin blade, almost shaving my eyebrows. I gulped in air as it exfoliated my forehead.
     “So, yeah,” he said, in a way that suggested he had been talking before. I often stopped listening in the euphoria of potentially having my earlobe nicked. “Yeah, well,” he continued. “It was what I always wanted to do. I wasn’t tall enough, you see. But now they’ve got rid of the height requirement – equal opps and all that – so I’m going to give it a try. I never wanted to be a hairdresser, not really.” 
     I gasped, as if he had drawn the blade across my throat. “You’re leaving?” I asked, carefully neutral.