A circular keep with chapel and battlements
mock-medieval (mostly nineteenth century)
mist-blue and sunlit, tucked into the horizon

staring from a distance through thorny twigs
she tests a spike on the pad of her thumb
wondering how the genes produce such sharp tips

*

Problems with her feet
'shooting pains' as she walks around the room
having to ask her husband to take her home

undoing the little button on the strap, rubbing the skin
staying elegant, even in pain
(she bends forward with legs neatly crossed)
her sentences rasped with a foreign intonation

'A certain kind of Greekness'
wide-hipped, broad-shouldered, large-boned
big eyes and dark rippling gold –

'Beautiful hair!' another woman remarked
as her friend, with hers fashionably short at the front
a rat's tail nape, turned round to look

*

In the window of a newly opened lingerie shop
a suntanned young woman is sitting on a chair
in lace-trimmed black satin underpants and bra

gripping the seat like a school-child on a desk
swinging her toes in back-less stilettos
and smiling self-consciously

this in a cobbled country town, on a Sunday

*

A rust-red nap on the shadowed tree trunks
green leaves, horizontal, cutting out the glare,
on the ground, a soft pink matting of beech loam

a girl in strapped helmet, old jeans and Wellingtons
is holding a small dappled grey round the neck
as it skitters along
eyes wide with alarm or curiosity

a pedigree, exquisitely groomed and bridled
it would bound away, if she didn't hold it tight.

Copyright © Mary Michaels, 2006.

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Mary Michaels' New and Selected Poems, The Shape of the Rock (2003), was selected for the 'Alternative Generation' list in 2005. Assassins, her sixth pamphlet from Sea Cow Press, appeared in 2006, and a collection of short fictions My Life in Films was also published in 2006 by The Other Press. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. She lives in London.