(for Julian)

You’re just a boy and I’m
just an invisible girl. You’re
tenderness, light, angelic.
You’re a still life portrait.
I’m making arrangements using
the sympathetic imagination
that I was given by my mother.
She taught her daughters
well. Taught them how to live, to love,
to speak. To be dominated
in other words, by powerful
men and to be submissive to
them. I’m eating the sweet

fragrant pears. Catching
 the juice running down my chin deftly with my hand.
My fingers. Today, life is
 sweet. Tomorrow the past will catch up with
me. The day is a garden. I
know this instinctively. I gather,
the photographs, the light of
the day, the afternoon sun, guests.
What am I making arrangements for?
To send a manuscript away
for a competition. In my life, the boy
lives his life like a celebrity and
memory masks everything.

It’s easy to love the boy from afar.
In real life, he is cold towards me.
A close friend of my brother’s
but he pays me no attention. He does
not adore me. In his world, I do
not exist. I live for him. But he does
not, will not, live for me. So, I
admire him from afar. I worship
 him from afar. I love him in my own way.
He does not know anything of days
 of loneliness, solitude, isolation, futility. Breath,
to me, means survival of the fittest.
Bring out the cooked fish. The hot cross buns.

Spread your wings and fly, girl.
Spread your wings and fly, girl.

I start on the peaches next and
then the apricots and cold plums.

***********************************************************************
Abigail George has two books in the Ovi Bookshelves,
"All about my mother" & "Brother Wolf and Sister Wren"
Download them, NOW for FREE HERE!