Allison McVety

Exercise Books

Kat’s eyes are the colour of chemistry
and Frobisher house-points, but when Emily
says modern languages are purple, I see
papal robes and Mr Gregory’s Redford tash. 

Surely French is in the ruffles of plane trees
and Drake’s maps? And how can red be geography,
when it’s clearly in the paisley folds of calculus
and further maths; in Scott’s immortal dash?

Livingstone and English literature stream
through the atrium, find us laughing at a leaky
pen. Twenty years from Mrs Wadden’s speech
impediment and she is still Anthony and Lycidas.

I cry for Joe Keller, for his sons; for the cabby,
for the poor horse, for Stevie on the street.
And not even Mallory’s orange zest of history
can pull me from her cirrus daffodils in class.

The Train Driver's View

Mostly, he gets the backsides of houses
flashed at him like drawerless drunken women. 
No front room frill or bit of net, but a dressing
down of open yards and washing lines:

the off-white news that filters over fences.
And in winter, as he slows for points, or
InterCitys, under the scrutiny of 60Ws,
he spots a woman at the sink, up to her elbows

in a row she’s had the night, the year before.
He thinks you can track the changes here,
in the trip along a passage from front door
geraniums to lean-to late-night fags.

All of life hanging in an outside lavatory,
hooked like squares of hand-cut newsprint,
filled with things you’ve never had, and fluttering
in the draught of people going places fast.

Urmston Brickworks

Not much to show for it now
but blasted brick and, from the hill,
across the flats to Carrington,
the Shell refinery burns off its oil
late into the night, and pylons
make a sampler of the sky,
cross-stitching power with steel.
There are starlings most mornings
toasting themselves on tensile thread
whilst  underneath, the brickworks
unpicks itself. Scree is netted,
like aida-cloth, against the slow
crumble, each fall stained red
as though we’ve pricked the past
and it has opened up and bled for us.

Typewriter

It stored up its letters like tinned sardines,
before Gothic and Comic, when we said
what we meant, let it rattle about,
a racket of how we felt at the time.
This was when words mattered
for the newness of them, not yet
worn in the company of others,
when concatenation and Haliborange
clattered like a child’s feet in a mother’s heels.
To type was to run through a wet ginnel,
shouts heavy in our mouths, to hear
the slap of our own names in the foot’s
repeat. Secrets like cunnilingus
and fellatio came next, pulled
from the dictionary and pressed to the page,
lines slipped into envelopes, stuffed
back into books and hoarded instead
for the feel of them, read years later,
a hammer of sound as big as the silence
in when, the power of no. How we bared
ourselves on rigid keys, heard our days
replayed in the echo of that emptied-out
rib cage of Q W E R T Y.

Offices

Through the glass blades there’s another country,
its language bulky in our mouths, clumsy
and weighted with acronyms. Here, we hold
our laptops open while we walk as if
cradling scriptures, or babies, in the crooks
of our arms. Go north in the lift and there’s
a shift in dialect, accents thicken
with money.
                            And in July this is pierced
only by the tilting slang of Anna,
selling ice creams, pen to pen, cool-bag brim-
ful of Magnums which we eat privately,
like sin. The room outside’s stippled with ducks;
and a man astride a lawn mower lays
rolls of Axminster on the off-chance we’ll
look up, which we never do. The gospels
speak in tongues; our babies stir, cry for us.