THE CERTIFICATES Mothers were not given space to write their occupations on UK birth certificates until 1984. Source: General Register Office The registrar takes his pen, tips its freight of permanent ink to write Poet in the space that did not exist beside my mother’s name, or my grandmother’s name. Those bloody, sweat-drenched women sent back to hearth and cradle, their skills cancelled, never known. My mother had four children in a decade, each certificate proving nothing but birth. My lineage? Patriarchal: father/farmer, father/journalist, a family’s passage from land to desk, but my mother’s story of travel, of being photographed, of earning in a day what my father brought home in a week was hushed. I watch the registrar write, as my baby daughter cries at my chest, and I’m thankful for her ringing lungs, this primary deed, this sure beginning of her archive.

THE ARGENTINIAN RUGBY WOMEN Defeat is certain. But the Argentinian rugby women put their minds to being defeated with honour. The terraces are filled only with relatives, the match broadcast on a channel no one watches – but the Argentinian mothers stand up and yell, wave the national flag. They’ve followed their daughters to the other side of the world knowing they wouldn’t get past the first round. The Argentinian players display el Sol de Mayo on their scrum caps – their opponents tackle them without pity, crushing them into the sludge. The Argentinian mothers hold up: they’ve dragged their husbands along, the same men who’d refused to allow their daughters to practise such a degrading sport. The Argentinian mothers too had disapproved at first. Now they scream from the stand.

HEADSTRONG I’m sorry catches in the throat and bruises in that wavering hesitation like a rock falling back to earth. See how it curves under the skin, twists and cuts as it hugs the voice box. I forgive sways like a tamarack— hackmatack, red larch, juniper, larix laricina—of the low-lands with roots in cool mud and branches in the soft air where we hold the belief we are stronger than wind. The end is as blue as slag and twice as worthless. This is where I say I never meant it, and this is where you say it doesn’t matter anymore because words are less than clouds and leaves and stone.

SUGGESTIONS FOR LIVING, a cento After Jessie Lendennie Lay still, the sounds heard the beginnings of comfort; feel the sea on the wind, the fall-falling of the wave riding the horizon and the waves recede beyond the cliffs, beyond the trees; rows upon rows, filling their long trailing sacks; in the darkness, the silence at the centre of the wind, the sound of rain. In the dark, trace a circle around the willow time the slowest of movements; fine rain against thin glass, against hard stones like so many broken children; grow into Gypsy, Hobo, a child of rain; know water as it seeps from sky, from the heart; know the sharp light of sun on bottles broken in the street. The horizon is both this path and the edge of the sea; and memory is a fracturing, a breaking of light and dark with an old dog who knows all the secret places down the unpaved road to the calm bay; become part of something sacred salmon in a small stream that rolled down to the beach, going home or starting out. Believe in past lives; sit and wait for everyone to come home silver dogs in the sea, unhindered, gazing down the valley to Liscannor, Lahinch and the bay; walk the stones of Clahane: romantic Ireland smells of soft wind; move slowly among ghosts whose bodies are anywhere but here; lose place; follow another pack; maybe take a wrong turn at the edge of the sea as the last storm leaves again; lay still, the night moved past; brush wonder as a child, fingers tapping at windows; reach out, softly moved.

NAMES When we arrived on the island the land had the same colour of the sky so blue we thought we were standing on the skin of the Earth. On the road to the new house, wild herbs and a yellow flower with a name meaning the first: Primula, Linnaeus called it, or the earliness of flowering or the immediate blossoming after the disappearance of snow. In the garden plants were waiting for the end of winter pollens were embedded in the soil: a prehistory of death recycling new beginnings; a bulb in the clods had a raindrop on its folded green stem an immortal trace made mortal by light. We too adapted to dying back and regrowing the next season. We got new names and a raindrop folded in the mind, a memory keeper in the planet archive the ultimate cell beyond names a survivor embryo moving between worlds

AY DE MI In the version my abuela told me, she had taken a lover, or maybe she was a widow, on the prowl for a new husband. In either case, she had to get rid of her children to please a man. This we understood. We knew about our mothers and their boyfriends. Even the ones that became step-fathers could never really see us as theirs. Be good, or La Llorona will get you. We could imagine it all so easily, our little barrio by the river. In every version, there is always a body of water, there is always a drowning. This we understood as well. Our grandfathers had crossed a river; that’s why they called us wetbacks. We understood the borders between life and not-life, how they must be drawn in water and breath. Now, her restless spirit searches endlessly for children, calling, ¿Dónde están mis hijos? When modern Medeas made the news, we knew them for what they were. Then one night, I heard it, too, the crying. Terrified, I hid under the covers. My mother told me, It’s just a story, and the sound you heard— it was just mourning doves. But mourning doves don’t sing at night. If you hear La Llorona, run the other way. Later, I realized I must have heard a real woman crying, those old houses built within arm’s length of each other, open windows in the summer meant we could hear everything going on next door and I didn’t know a single woman on the block that didn’t have a reason to weep. In some versions, it was an act of mercy. She’d rather see her children dead than destitute, bereft of love. Now that I am a woman who has shed her share of tears, I understand the wandering fog, and making choices each more damned than the last.

TWO GIRLS PEELING APPLES The sky of 5.47PM takes up a saffron rhythm and the horizon is fading tiger stripes all around our heads. The first of the evening’s moths welcome-dance against the porch light and we craft something without words or hands. Spanish speakers like to call it crepúscolo, but as with all beautiful things, the mood is untranslatable, slippery language, a sensation we share across the ebbing gap between us, a nod of acknowledgement. We press bodies as we peel the last of the apples, their turning, twisting skin falling into the shared bucket at our feet with a satisfying thwup. Who would build heaven, when this space exists? Where I can recount the story of Hi’iaka and Hopoe at the point their myth diverges; they reconcile and everything is held tight by superseding death, and your knee kisses mine with multiple intent. You nod at the right places without really listening, your superhero skill, content in the knowledge that you will hear it again, receiving my touch, returning it with promise. The evening stretches out infinite and fluid.

HAVEN Deer lightfoot across a clearing into shadowed trees.   Dogs turn the flock widdershins, for home. Against the sky: homing crows.   We remember windows shut tight, a birch tree, ink on bark paper, twig broom, raft pole, cradlebones.   A plane snarls overhead, two geese gust, honking off the lake, ripples shudder ashore.   It lasts as long as the dream. And after?   Deepwater lull of the island in the harbour.   When the wars have ended: then.

WE START WITH THE SKIN We see first, think How obvious it is. Then, how much it gives away How it becomes terrain, shaping as we move maps of lines coded in creases and scars How it reveals the ridges of twisting bones veering off, and There is a blossoming of red mouths across my stomach mumbling snide remarks that make me squirm in my clothes all day There is a fever that comes and goes all night even my forearms sweat And I try to make friends with it these growing pains this shutting down what freedoms it will bring what dreams will come what dreams will be overcome secrets etched on a flake of dandruff As a consequence of the story— telling, drama happens everything falls apart but not away: I am a raven’s nest of shiny odds and ends buttons that close nothing attach no intensions, make no mistake I am a loose gathering of loose talents in a tackle box in my granddaughter’s crafts room and she will piece something together a framework a new skin to hold it all together for a new, little while from her perspective of what was my body in the world

HOUSE OF MIRRORS I’m now the old bag from No. 5, deliverer of perfectly worded missiles of passive aggression over parking spots. Front-liner in this inter-generational war, I look up from my probiotic grains only to be curdled by a glance from the go-to-work youngster from number 1a who has to walk 50 yards further to her car. I can’t see that she is me, 30 years ago; can’t get beyond my envy at that resting bitch face of perfect potential. She can’t see that I am her if she waits long enough. She won’t feel the time pass in that quantum leap till she’s looking out of a suburban window over gluten free oats. And neither of us can see a mother on her Cailleach chair, immersed in photographs, staring long enough to see figures move, hear voices from the past, which is present for her, and for you and me, if we just wait long enough.

$600 Here for $600 you can buy a purebred Siberian Husky pup a digital display microwave a proheat all rounder vacuum a freestanding cooker a mini laptop a man's bike barely used There for $600 you can buy a 12 year-old girl not used at all

PARALLEL Fuelled by her inner alarm she'd help me rise before dawn find folded clothes resting by my bedside eat breakfast waiting at the kitchen table stepped out into air that still held night like a child in its arms. There'd be a crack in the sky as we entered the loamy womb of the mushroom house emerging later - as clothes from a tumble drier creased but still wearable backs aching into the white of morning to sit in the break room hut eat a cellophane wrapped lunch I never saw her make - salad cream baps, a chocolate biscuit washed down with a mug of tea. She'd leave me to school then we'd meet again at home where every surface gleamed the kitchen floor always smelled like the swimming pool shimmering in sunlight I felt I could dive in. Never once did she say we were broke about to lose everything.

THE WOMEN WAKES UP A simile of dusk Uncovers the dew on the hills and Presents itself to the woman’s eyes Orange and blue specks are strewn across the mundane skies As thrushes chirp at a distance And temple bells dampen the sorrow-drums The air is full with fragrant naïveté Of yet-to-bloom jasmines While the world sleeps in tranquil sobs She rises to watch the golden ball Climb the mountains and clouds Trying to get a hold on the emptiness That lies beyond it all The yellow orb serves to reinstate The faith in her dormant compassion The faith that nothing stays forever in the dark The faith that new beginnings have a tinsel arch As she slips on bangles of responsibility That nervously clank against one another And give way to her ever-unheard full-throated voice Her anxious desire to be seen and heard Covers all the sand dunes in one embrace And pine trees atop the hill reverberate In storms of a cheerful rage Turbulence amplifies as she Absorbs and reflects Assimilates and forgets Imagines and creates Summoning her sacred energies And manifesting lofty towers of sunlight Worlds and words of beauty and serendipity Emerge and crumble to dust again She imagines as she moves She creates as she imagines She loves as she creates She illuminates as she loves They have always found a twinkling tear Lining the bottom of her left eye Which has left an indelible footprint on the psyche of the Moon Gazing noiselessly from a distance Hardened over time She has used the salinity of water to restore leaves Of the tree of Life From ignorance to bondage She has borne it all On her delicate strong shoulders She has allowed streams of teardrops To carry her to another realm of rationality Forbearance is demanding Forgiveness is demeaning Colouring within the lines She reveals the beauty of infinitude The spaces between words of discord and non-compliance Fill up with the colour of nothingness Iridescent prisms of raindrops mingle With teardrops of serendipity That had once begrudgingly fallen from experienced irises Joy explodes into a billion balls of love Dewdrops moisten the grass she has walked on all her life Freedom heaves a sigh of relief Her feet give out But a pair of wings emerges Birds of hope rush to paint the firmament Crystals of love spill in all directions Illustrating fresh beliefs Writing new stories Creating and manifesting Absorbing and reflecting Evolving and evaporating Dissolving and embracing Refraining and collecting Falling and rising Pausing and moving Untouched and unaltered With effortless care The woman wakes up

GIRLS ONLY for Shell We struck one – nothing. We struck two and something – Little pyro-poof! Our hands huddled around it, Wishing it. We threw it down On our dry leaf mound And magic! We had a secret. Girls only – Since we weren’t allowed in the boy’s den. But out of our hands, it went wild And our secret Smoke-signaled Above the trees Tattle-telling. Shell-shocked we rushed To a plastic pool And wrestled the water Into the woods But it slipped from our fingers And fell short of help. By the time we reached A pail of rainwater, it was way too late. We ran home red-handed And phoned without giving our names. The sirens came. The shame lasted as long as The charred circle remained. First from our fingers, Then out of our hands – Let us learn: Not too quick to prove. Our power is within.