By Alan Kissane
Sing a song -
a dead mouse
found beneath her dress.
Four and twenty scratches
decorate the mess
in the hall,
spilled like sweet morning
coffee without milk
or sunlight. She didn’t
scream. She just laughed
as intelligent people do
to those they pity. To have
all the walls
anyone could ever need
is a dream I’ve often had
since the silence rattled
the poison from the tail. I’ve tried
to live
as quietly as a footstep
in the sand
ever since the knotwood trains stopped
drifting to my home town. I want
to believe they need me
more than I need them.
She’ll never return
like the mouse
and I’ll never return
just like the pity. Perhaps
I was right about the trains after all.
Alan Kissane works as a teacher of English in the Midlands, UK. His poetry has appeared in print and online at Allegro, Culture Matters, Dissonance Magazine, Dreich, Dust Poetry, Emerge Literary Journal, Epoch, Fahmidan, iamb, Kindling, and Neologism, amongst others. He is currently editing his first chapbook entitled ‘She Took The Children Now We Wait’.
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