Billie Manning
Skin cold, then hot, then icy again.
Hairline wet as a licked kit.
She considers screaming a long scream into her mother’s face.
She considers the sparrowhawk, its eyes green and then yellow.
She should write down the routine, how to keep out the lynx.
You are a staircase turned the wrong way, her mother said once.
White marble leading to nowhere.
Outside, the moonlight holds itself.
The peaches will continue in the yard, she has made the soil good.
Absent-mindedly, she imitates the movement with which she is able to slip
her thumbs inside the packed flesh to remove the pit.
Like this, she mumbles aloud.
Once, she remembers, she came without touching herself at all.
The morning rises with no wind to speak of.
Okay. Light curving in like a valley of snow.
Billie Manning is from Hackney. She is a Barbican Young Poet and her work has appeared in Magma, bath magg and Popshot, as well as Bad Betty’s Survival anthology. She teaches poetry courses at City Lit and elsewhere.
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