Mary Michaels

SMOKE

Acrid grey smoke from the sewing machine
coming out in clouds

take your foot off the pedal – turn off the electricity –
unplug the cable!

run for a blanket from the cupboard next door,
throw it over – hold it down – to smother the fire!

it takes quite a while

with the fumes of hot plastic, metal and oil, seeping in spirals
through the weave of the fabric

filling up the house

**

Big sister, little brother – ‘the children’ – in their sixties
with a wife and a husband
in the flat that was their mother’s

using all the beds

their clothes and pills and bottles of lotions, shoes and suitcases
piled up everywhere

Immaculately tidy, she’d always kept it

the story of her life
her rewritten story, the various stories, now just in people’s heads
in bits and pieces

to filter into conversations through the gaps

**

I was in Rome or some other foreign capital

responsible for taking a mother and daughter, with luggage
to the airport to catch their plane home

I went to the hotel to collect them
and had a bit of awkwardness, parking:
the car – or a chair – had to be carried down some steps

then the older woman had mislaid her bag
she wasn’t very bothered
I said I’d get it forwarded when it was located

the trouble was I couldn’t find my vehicle
and we were walking through streets I didn’t recognise

never having been in this city before

**

On the last of the buttons, the threads make a cross
(the others all sewn with two parallel shanks)

noticing this difference, I feel dissatisfied
would like to completely unpick and re-stitch it

but that would be hard on the soft shirt-weight denim
and might make a tear

Leave it and live with it.

WAVED

Like a flower at the end of a long twig
last white petals being swayed by the wind

or a handkerchief waved by a woman on the quay
as a ship goes out, in an old newsreel

a cloth being wiped across a window pane
inside the glass
with a metronome movement

the only thing light in the dark rectangle

clearer to see you with

**

They're coming towards us under blue sky, in bright cottons, barefoot; loaded with plastic water cans, bundles of bedding, cooking pots, kindling. An ocean roller about to break. The German photographer crouched for this shot. Then he went on to stir up the militia men, waving his scarf and shouting their slogans, so that they'd copy him, grinning and holding up their AK47s. Embellishing the silence of a just cleansed dwelling, a young insurgent was seated at a Baby Grand trying out sequences learnt at the Conservatoire: better if he put on his black balaclava, and fetched an automatic to lay on the piano lid.

'The centre of the city,' says the man in fatigues, leaning over the empty apartment's balcony; structures half-demolished, girders buckled, cement and breeze-block infill crumbled, cracks in façades of once white marble. 'But we'll rebuild it.'

A narrow alley between oxblood bricks. The gates are open. Walls and walkways and hidden flights of steps. You move without noticing from level to level. Down in a well, through a plate-glass partition, there's a body full-length, in apparent repose, flanked by two figures in sea-green scrubs, not quite symmetrical –

'There's no picture,' says the one with a Nikon, confronted with a scattering of severed limbs. The journalist, appalled, thinks this must be shown; but we get the idea – no focal point, no unifying pattern, the separate components being very hard to read. When children come running over the sand and jump the blackened body parts (making for the strangers and anticipated sweets) this – by contrast – has possibilities. A way of thinking that you quickly fall into.

The editors said they'd considered very carefully, hence the inside page. Three paces forward of a line of viewfinders, face up in the dust, what at first you might take for the snapped-off head of a shop window dummy, in a rust-coloured wig.