Rebecca Tamás
1
Two ghosts accompany you to the edge of the wood. How do you tell them about your recent purchase of premier delivery? How do you explain to them that there’s a pair of printed trousers that have been in your online basket for weeks, blinking? It is impossible. You come from a profane and tainted age.
The wood is hushed, and snow settles on their ghost eyebrows and then sinks into their ghost faces. The thin soft light of the morning wobbles. They hand you an axe.
2
That must be your grandmother sitting at the gilt table, opening her cigarette case, sighing quietly. Her voice is a mitteleuropean hash, low popping noises like streetlights being turned out. The paths around the grand café are wet with snow, and screaming sounds come from the carriages as they go quickly round the corner.
Slowly the snow turns to hail, tapping on the roof – or perhaps that’s gunfire? Just in case, some of the café patrons hide under their velvet chairs, but your grandmother ignores the clamour, folds her napkin, brings out a French novel. You feel a cold terror in your chest, but you still sit up straight, admire your own bravery for a moment. Blood comes out of your mouth onto your clean white shirt.
3
At your father’s funeral, his enemies stand around the grave in carnivalesque evening cloaks, fur trimmed edges hanging in the mud. They have the melancholy, queasy faces of gargoyles, both scrambled and craggy.
A deep hole has been cut in the ground and snow falls into it, salt entering a wound. Urfuʼa ugʼulla usliha v’khappara. Verevah vehatzala. Something begins to seep from your bones like milk from bread, but you can’t say that it’s forgiveness. Rather, like music, it is a substance made from unnameable things.
Unlike the clean smooth urn, unlike the pale snow-heavy air, the hole is not reflecting but producing brightness. You take a step towards it. That something, with the thrill of an orchestra, begins to tune up.
Rebecca Tamás‘s first full length collection of poetry, WITCH, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2019, and was a Poetry Society Choice and a Paris Review Staff Pick. Her poetry has been published in magazines including Granta, The London Review of Books, The New Statesman, Poetry Review, Poetry London, Magma and The White Review.
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