Lipstick

Lipstick

Balanced
on the bottom step
I read to them from my notebook
while they with lipstick
make smiling more lovely.

I watch my mother
back straight,
calm as eggs
pick up the cranging phone and mouth to me
'Emily' with her arms full of a sister and supper.

Emily pegs her words out,
awkward as an angle
on old black string
dragging tin cans through sawdust
and ruckling cats the wrong way.

Azzie at my back picks up on agitation,
makes a show of my shadow.
She does not know
I can see her in the window and that there are
a thousand cyclists on my tongue.

I could cut myself on spokes
and so, 'Emily, I have to go'.
Turning round they crowd like petals to pollen
and exclaim that they like my lipstick.

I smear smudge it off onto my pink skin
and watch my mother's back
orthapaedically immaculate and precise,
pretend to attend to my brother.