5

It is one a.m. I am typing in my bedroom
and the Chinese woman, who lives next door with her white husband and three wee children, is crying.
My pregnant friend has loaned me her manual typewriter, a 1960 vintage Olympia.
it has no exclamation marks,
so I must assume that strong emotions are a modern invention
and improvise with apostrophe and period.
I have set the typewriter on the rickety metal table
left by the loud, boozy girl who used to have this room,
a girl infamous for seducing a seminarian.
Typing is a noisy matter of bells, thumps, and rattles.
The girls who have lived here for a year and a half
speculate that the Chinese woman is a mail-order bride
and speaks no English. That isn’t true, however,
because through the thin wall we share,
I can hear her crying “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!”
Her voice spirals higher and higher to a keening, worldless wail.

8

It’s Sunday and raining, and the boyfriend calls by unexpectedly.
I invite him in, give him a cup of tea, and we trade stories of dreams.
Last night I was a whore, and the night before, a waitress on a train.
He’s been dreaming of gunfire shattering the bedroom windows of their previous flat,
and those teeth dreams again, his teeth loosening and falling out in strange and urgent ways.
Nightmares leave me fatigued, and he seems knackered as well.
I look at him and realized I’m already forgetting
the curve of his shoulder in my hand, the taste of his skin.
Last night, I came home from work at five a.m. and ran a hot bath.
The bathroom light has beenout for six months, so I lay in the dark,
soaking the smoke and onion out of my skin.
I’ve lost nearly a stone since coming to Belfast,
and these surprisingly small hips, gilrish belly, and thin thighs
that I soaped and rinsed by feel alone
might belong to another woman for all I can tell.
I soaked and soaked, trying to remembmer that story about the mermaid.
She fell in love, didn’t she?
She traded her voice for legs, and, presumably, a crotch.

18

The boyfriend and I go to see the exhibit by the German artist.
The main attraction is four giant spools, tall as me,
perhaps originally for electrical cable but now fitted with metal punctured in swirls.
They are placed mathematically across the black plastic floor,
each trailed by a path of white sand
as if it has sifted from the spool as it rolled.
The title translates as “The Landscape of Mental Confusion,”
and the boyfriend examines the sculpture closely.
He crouches and squints. “It’s fake,” he concludes,
“he didn’t really roll these across the floor. He sifted the sand by hand.”
He touches his finger to it and leaves a single, deep print.
For a moment I feared he was going to write his name.
Later, over a pint, he says “I think you are the most dishonest person I know.”
We are talking about writing.
He is not aware that he is becoming more of a chracter than a lover ot me.
He buys me a gin and bitter lemon. He asks if he can call by the next day.
He goes home to his girl.
It is strange to be happy about any of this.

19

Before Brookside, I watch the UTV report of the kneecapping at the Hatfield on Saturday night.
THere’s footage of the fellow all doped up on morphine>
Although he is naked but for his underpants as he sprawls on hte hospital bbed,
and the camera lingers lovingly on the stained gauze
round his knees and ankles, on his black and swollen toes,
on his eyes dilated and calm, this is no sexual pose.
Then there’s footage of his mum, a woman with cried-out eyes,
who recites a catalog of dead or wounded brothers, husband, and sons.
And her this whole life living on the Lower Ormeau.
Sitting on the settee in the unearthly light of the TV,
I consider the verbs we have made from body parts:
to eye, to face, to foot, to shoulder, to back, to arm.

34

The streets of Belfast are paved with broken glass.
I’m like a magpie, my eye caught
by the green glitter of bits of bottle in gravel,
the hunks ofs shattered mirrors around skips,
the bright sprinkle in mud of emptied window panes.
This morning I noticed that an entire bus shelter panel had been smashed—
one of those annoying ones with the daft margarine advert:
“If I love you then I need you,
if I need you then I want you around.”
What that has to do with fake butter, I do’nt know.
In any case, it was thick glass,
specialy made of this sort of violence in mind,
because instead of breaking into long, sharp daggers,
it crumbled into countless round-edged kernels
that lay in heaps on the sidewalk, blue as ice.
They could have been jewels or teeth,
and a few larger pieces, crazed with cracks,
were still wedged into the corners of the frame.
The boyfriend once told me that the sound of glass breaking
the second after a bomb blast in the city centre
was beautiful. It’s amazing, so it is,
how they’ve designed glass that sounds beautiful in the breaking
but isn’t dangerous when broken.
I can pick up bits, put them in my pocket, and safely take them home.