Secret Messages

He leaves the phone cradle
Turtle-flipped
Beside a biro doodle of fire
To remind her
Of the night they sat
Wang-eyed on a see-saw
And kids set some bins alight
Near the far railings.
The flames made shadow bars
Climb the whitestone houses
So when curtains jerked aside
It looked like the people were in jail.

She writes a short story
Featuring a scene with
Pointed similarities to their first fuck
And sends it to a magazine
Hoping he’ll hazard across it
Some lazy Saturday breakfast
And by the time he realises
His new squeeze ‘ll have planted
Her babydoll chin on his shoulder:
‘Watcha reading?’
And he’ll reflex-shrug her off, suddenly
Unaccountably
Angry.

But it’s church that pulls them up short.
They can’t countenance so much as
Chopsticks fallen crosswise
Or the bible black of a smoker’s lungs
Without thinking of an apple
Plucked live from the tree,
The waxy yellow carapace
That gave way to juice
And how
They realised their nakedness.