Mandy Coe

Salt

He tasted me before I boarded the ship,
picked me out from the others,
leaned forward and licked my face with a tongue, strong and pink as a calf’s.
I could have left then,

shot into the sky. I could have
gone to live on the other side of the clouds,
but the jetty pressed against my bare feet,
cold stone drawing hot piss low in my belly.

The harbour echoed with shouts,
the drag of chains, the thunder of barrels rolling.
A rat squeezed out of a porthole and dropped.
Men peered at the stinking water; threw stones.

He tasted me
and I smelled meat and wine on his breath.
In that close moment I saw the pores of his skin,
the curve of an earlobe, bushy eyebrows,

tangled as the ship’s ropes and masts.
The wetness on my cheek cooled in the breeze.

He held out his tongue, wiped it on his sleeve,
laughing and speaking
to the man with the pen, who looked at me,
wrote down a name.

In Love with a Map

First I looked at it
then whispered its name.
It didn’t take long to get naked,
ink staining elbows and thighs.

The paper tore a little along folds
weakened from all those travels.
I remember us spreading it on the car bonnet,
air shimmering with heat

Then, pinned flat with stones
in that field. We lay, watching insects
leap onto its surface: giants!
I could be vulgar, roll it up,
or slide along it’s edge. But it’s not like that.

Just to open it out, press my skin
to the places we went. My nipple
eclipsing that mountain,
my lips on the sea.

Illegal

I crawl through dust
where gullies turn their back on the sea,
a man comes to me

in a fast, straight line as if I am
the answer to a question.

I hold my shadow underneath;
a dark flattened child.
When he touches me
with the side of his boot,
he doesn’t ask.

Mosaics, Piazza Armerina

Assassination of Maximilianus Hercules

For these stones to work
you must stand back, but I am pulling you close.
Indeed, your face might be pressed to the tiles,
your son-in-law’s knife in your ribs, seeing nothing
but abstraction, perhaps
the swirl encircling Arione’s breast.

You walked her skin a thousand times,
tigers lurching
in drunken lamplight, snaking tesserae
allowing the spotted hare to jump,
waves to shimmer beneath Hercules’s ship.

You dropped a cloak in the lemon tree,

a shoe in the Queen of Sheba’s lap.
You even laid a girl
among the bulls, then laughed
at the patterns on her back.

The sparkle in Arione’s eye
is one white square. Your blood
runs along the grout Hesitating
at every junction, it moves through
the maze one tile at a time.

All Rise

Although you were terrible at maths,
you still have the lightning ability
to measure the speed of the organist
What a friend we have in Jesus,
and multiply this by the number of verses.
This hymn

O what peace we often forfeit,
O what needless pain we bear,
will last for years.

You sway: tiny arcs of grief.
Have we trials and temptations?
Is there trouble anywhere?
Behind you, that woman,
her voice: sweet. Whereas
yours is thin, trapped in a key
Are we weak and heavy laden,
cumbered with a load of care?
that keeps it a child’s.

You could kill the bitch;
vault over pews and rip tissue thin pages
from her book. The organist wouldn’t stop
What a privilege to carry
everything to God in prayer!
but the singing would. Everyone turning
to watch the storm of tumbling paper
In his aims he’ll take and shield thee;
thou wilt find a solace there.