“Sheep Thrive Even On Rocks, Good For Nothing Else,” from Biggle Sheep Book, 1912
Digital image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
It’s Saturday morning. My children
& I travel the M6 to Birmingham
& I brave myself for the sign—
a slip road to Coventry.
Once, it was a different scene:
my body, younger, twenty,
anticipated the call from the train
conductor as I lunged willingly
toward him—it never ends, does it,
blaming the victim. I don’t
tell my children in the car how
I still shake though I’m thirty-five—
it helps to remember something sharp
from that time, like a gasp of
air while floundering—that even
he couldn’t take the thrill
a younger me bit into, having
carefully chosen what to wear &
I felt so powerful. Before the flood
of are we there yets & the cosmos
made of present tense, I hear
past-me admit she likes the rush,
his hands, the sound our throats tried to
make before sunken cathedral stone.