Hannah Lowe

The stork arrived alone one day, beak sharpened like a bayonet. All the love you’ve had turned bad! he sang, eyes boring through the dingy nets. He hopped onto the patio. Good lord! Is this a rented flat? Behind the shed, albino rats were nuzzled on a family bed. He hovered over them, wings spread. Now this is how you do it! he said. He speared a worm and sucked it down. A rented flat, my god, he said. Inside, I laid my hands around my lump, my pumpkin-up-the-jumper. I’d swapped the wine and cigarettes for goji berries, spent the summer asleep or stretched in yoga pose, Utkatasana, Dhyana... The stork came hopping round the corner scraped his claw across the door — Hello, hello? he called, polite, then screamed I will not be ignored! He had a bloody bone to pick, an oozy piece of mind to share. I was eight months gone by Halloween. Kids rang the rented bell in sheets and slime. I tried “maternal” out with chocolate limes and fizzy sweets. The bird shrieked half the witchy night: For god’s sake, are you stupid? Teeth! I waddled off to pack my case — gorillas snoozing on the onesies, pink booties, pads to catch the blood. When they tugged that baby out of me he came up laughing, blessed the midwife with a fiery arc of golden pee and through the skylight of the ward I saw the stork retreat, zigzagging up into the evening sky, a fading squawk, the beat of wings. Then they laid that baby on my chest to feed, and cut the navel string —

Errol drives me to Treasure Beach It’s an old story, the terrible storm swerving the dark country roads the ship going down, half the sailors I think about what you will be, your mix drowned, half swimming the white, black, Chinese, and your father’s slate waves, spat hard onto shore Scottish-Englishness. We cross the Black River Smashed crates, bodies where they shipped cane sugar and molasses choking on the black sand upstream past a sign One man stands —What is this place? A woman for Lover’s Leap. The air stinks of sulphur in the trees, one hand raised Errol drops me at a blue gate.Be safe This is how the Scotsmen came behind the house, the thin beach why the black people here have red hair of black sand, the water warm and gray Or the other story, no storm I am deep before I know it, groundless no wrecked ship. Just the miles the swell stops the sickness of cane fields and mulatto children named under a crooked tree, perched on sea rocks McDonald or McArthur for two fishermen in torn denims, smoking their fathers, who owned them I dry in the sun. They pass, turn, come close Nothing grows at Lover’s Leap they have rust afros, gold faces splashed with freckles where two runaways one ripped with muscle, one with eyes cornered by their master, held hands like razors.What you want here they say and jumped down into the clouds

I carry you, a fleck, to Jamaica At the Chinese temple in Kingston I am sick daily Victor leads me upstairs, says this floor was once Nights, I hold the bed’s edges full of beds where men off the boat