Four bananas
Scrape margarine across eight slices
of white bread, raspberry jam and Nutella and Marmite and jam again. Eight sandwiches – two each. Cut and wrap. It’s not enough. Add four bananas that will come home bruised and blackened mid-afternoon. Seal in four plastic lunch-boxes. It’s not enough. A thump of backpacks and a wrenching of zips, this daughter smiling and this daughter sullen, and these two in a stumbling panic – Don’t slam the door, don’t leave me here beside myself – these two, my hatchlings, my little ones, are gone, fallen through that bright rectangle to where the world waits with its claws and teeth, its every kind of sharp and sudden thing… I would halt traffic to let you pass, I would snarl and swipe at the dogs that bound from driveways, I would smooth and make safe and contain but all I am is here, I am always here – I wipe away the slopped cereal, inhale the sour smell of your rooms as I make your beds, the sheets in which the grains of your hot, dry bodies threshed all night already cooling.
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