Silent Landscape I, by Aisha Rajar
I
Many good men have been
killed by a woman.
‘Where have you been?
Let’s get to bed.’
I said, ‘I love my mother,
who bore me in the womb,’
but my bones are rattlesnakes.
My body is a rattlebag :
‘I am dressed up
for a night out of doors’
and she looked at me with a
cup of water, saying nothing.
II
I touched him
and he was dry as dust,
in all possibility
recalling my life exactly as it happened.
Then he said something like
‘take it away, Lou’
or ‘that’s the same thing twice,
in two ways’
and I tried to imagine
what it might feel like
to be dead,
or to work in a mortuary.
III
Maybe we, in the end,
knew all the world there was
in an unidentifiable whisper.
A brawl of the sea
collects upon the shore.
It coaxes me, wet & twice.
A week of evenings pass
like a kind of dementia.
Odysseus heard the Sirens
hungry; they were singing.
That it continues at all
is a miracle.
~ Rowland Bagnall
Rowland Bagnall is a 21 year-old student of English Literature, currently based in Oxford. He is the third of five children, and hopes to write for a living. His poetic interests include e.e. cummings and John Berryman.Â
