Alan Gillis

The girl from the satellite town holds berries in the fast stream supermarket queue. She carries her longing like a stream of song, her melody a body over the boundary of what is solid and what flows. The guys in the depression- hit town are tripping in the fruit aisle. Falling for her berry lightness they slip out from their outlines. One guy says she takes the form of a dream, or the dream of a form. On the page of the regional night berries pulse like the notes of a song in the stream. The girl who sheds the skin of her longing escapes into more longing. In a dream on the margins of town one of the guys hears a girl sing, her voice like strings, a basket of ripe berries floating into the night on a stream. The girl, the guy, in derelict bedrooms hear lucent songs undressing, streaming from their outlines through the boundaries of town wrapping around them the scent of fresh berries. And I was the guy and the girl was within the page of the town ever, over, after, never, the song long, long, long, long. The stream is slipped as the ground you stand on. Build houses out of song. The berries are undressing. The stream is long, gone, long. The girl dreams a form of dream, or forms a dream of form: the boundaries of song in the night undressed as a stream in the morning.

Emptied, precious, querulous, frail, a box of butter biscuits by the bedside, dun pills in a pale plastic tray, your grandmother lies in her tiny bones and mumbles, mysterious, while you say nothing, barely thirteen, blank as the day. You were to keep an eye on her breathing, her little bones heaving, and your eyes scan figurines, mementos on the windowsill — Little Bo Peep has lost her head — and green fields through the window: hay barns, small farms, a chicken battery shed. Bwwaaakk! Buck-back-bock-buckaaaakk! Rows upon rows of chickens. There was a funnel hung from a gibbet that swung like a big steel conical conundrum above their dun feathers — the color of your grandmother’s tights scrumpled on the floor. Even a year before, she would have swooned for shame at the sight of those tights half-trailed under her bed, their crinkled wee ankles jouking out, as if they had crawled under and tipped their wrinkled cargo into the void — your grandmother in bed, waiting for the spoon. Her weak breath does not reach heaven but hazes among the chipped figurines, the dull color television’s black screen, fading flesh-colored flowers on the wall- paper, dun as the wings of those dirt-crusted rows upon rows of throbbing chickens. When you dropped one into the funnel its head pushed through that blood-rimmed O to stare chicken-eyed at the other side, blackened numbles and giblets upon which it would soon stream like warm port, its feet still in a fidget. What gets passed on, through generations? Your grandmother tries to speak. Her bony fingers clutch your hand — and you bend your head down. But you’d get more sense from the sea in a seashell as your father enters the room beaming, Well! Well?

Forget about it for you’ll never win, never hit the jackpot, move in to a solar-powered eco mansion and modest philanthropy, become a panjandrum of diaphanous pleasures but must sink or swim beneath mood- mutable skies, coconut milk clouds, in the shadow of high flats, low sales, bright fronts, strung crowds of literally miraculous people in expensive skin like bed sheets you would wrap yourself in and which you now touch lightly as you enter this café past a clutch of mitching schoolgirls with pierced noses and Tintin hairdos who look at you as if to say is it dial-a-dickhead day in here? or maybe that’s aimed instead at the guy eating flatbread with five thousand friends on his phone who types with a grin all is well with the world, when all is not well with the world — the burden of debt as your granny might say heavy as sin — although who would begrudge this incense of crushed coffee in steam this clatter and chatter latex flowers under halogen lights and who’d demean that woman with her small child wiping the small child’s chin to the delight of a lonely well-off older person or w.o.o.p. — I believe they call them woopies — at the next table over who scoops two shaking spoons of sugar into a steaming cup then begins to call her son Oh my lost Son asking after her granddaughter while the mitching girls swagger out the door — look, one forgot her phone — ah good, someone caught her — and who would begrudge the yin and yang of this moment sitting here coming or going anyone and no one here or somewhere else stuck nowhere and flowing in the mix like everyone for you are blurring below indigo and ink-dim skies as time passes by like steam vapors into the run-of-the-mill gray coat you put on pausing, before leaving to meet this falling day which as your granny might say is the only day you’re in.