Amy Kinsman

Pillars of Salt

You are twenty years’ old

and speeding along these winding back passages,

nothing but chicken scratches

on the map of the moors,

and my feet are up on your dashboard

as you take the next bend

twice as fast as the speed limit,

your knuckles white against the wheel

and La Bohème drowning out

the sound of the car cutting through the air.

You like opera. Unironically.

And I can feel the humidity of your rage in here,

the anger that lives in the heels of your hands

thumping this faux-leather interior

to the rhythm of a spear against a shield.

There will be no yielding on your battlefields

all things will be avenged, the book of politic

ripped in two between your hands

like yellow pages, everything recorded,

and you become a page torn at the spine

from that great book of genealogy.

And he is still my father,

you remind me.

You tell me what it’s like to be fifteen years’ old

and ready to go to Afghanistan

just to get out of Ashton-under-Lyne

as we sit on the cusp of Hillsborough park’s duck pond

and watch Canada Geese gnash their teeth

at all these smaller birds,

juveniles, you’re saying, and females,

and the swans I suppose we were waiting for

never saw fit to arrive.

So you told me that you loved me

and I know you didn’t realise what you’d said

or where it sounded like a gunshot

through the empty streets, anticipated, dreaded.

All things are fair,

if the Geneva Convention collapses,

no one will be as good as their word

and women and children will get nothing they deserve.

They are your family,

I am saying soundlessly under the sirens

as you take your finger off the trigger,

Have you not heard yourself?

And now you’re telling me what happened

when you were ten years old -

where blame falls, or fails to,

and who cannot claim innocence

through deed or through ignorance

and I am shaking you by the shoulders

and begging for these words to stop tumbling

out of your mouth like a plague of locusts

and cursing the God that earmarked

some for this and

in a moment of blind injustice

saw fit to save a few and damn the rest -

that God who made Moses and Pharaoh both,

who placed each wound flush against your flesh,

who raffled off protection for bloody crosses

painted over the thresholds of these doorways,

who bargained against your childhood,

passed cruelty along the black scores of branches

turned snakes with fangs full of venom

and yanked the ladder just beyond the span of your grasp.

I am extending my hand.

Take it,

please take it,

because I cannot bear to watch

the fate you think was made for you

bite or flood or wreck

around the tree you fell from.

I will become salt.

Nothing was ever your fault.

Amy Kinsman is a poet and playwright living in Sheffield, England. When they are not studying for their MA in Creative Writing at the University of Sheffield, they are associate editor with Three Drops From A Cauldron and a student editor with Route 57. Their work has previously appeared, or is forthcoming, in After the Pause, Picaroon Poetry, Prole, Rust + Moth and Valley Press.