1

Sometimes I wake up crying. My face is wet and everyone’s asleep on seats around me. The driver, who’s watching in his mirror, gesticulates and waves his pack of cigarettes. We smoke outside in silence as the shadows dance and the road hums and glows in the bus lights. The following day I thank him as he drops me off at the Hotsprings. I saw my sister being gun-whipped and gang-raped. Now I find her lying in the algae beds. Her eyes are emerald green and her hair’s tangled blue – it oscillates in steam.

2

Now my dreams take me somewhere below the surface of water, which was already deeper than the grind of city pavements. Now they seem to take me inside the impact of violence, as if it’s no longer enough to connect a dead body with the elements and vegetation. I’m searching through rubber, leather and metal for any trace of her. But already they’re clearing the road and I’m getting frantic. I want her head, her face. Fate gives me an indistinct remnant of leg clinging to steel, so I stare in a last ditch effort. At last it disengages, turns to face me.

3

After this it was easier to understand my husband. I’d thought he was fooling, going around with a sheet over his head. I reached up to kiss him and realised that the sheet was to disguise the fact that he had no head. Oh no, I thought, this cannot be: a man with no head cannot be alive, and I panicked ever so slightly to think I’d kissed the wrong man. So I pulled off the sheet to find a neck where the head should be, and I didn’t know who it was until it opened its eye.

 

Copyright © Lucy Hamilton, 2007.

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Lucy Hamilton lives in Kent, where she teaches Chinese girls at an Ashford school. She has poems published and forthcoming in several magazines, including Staple, Magma, Smiths Knoll, Scintilla and Agenda, and also in the anthologies Parents, Entering the Tapestry (both Enitharmon) and In the Company of Poets (Hearing Eye).