I Borrow Aunt Ruby's Jane Eyre
Its olive greenness is already haunted, the spine
stiff with importance, lettered in gold
with wood engravings. I am barely twelve
when I open it, and the crocodile queue of girls
shuffles towards me off the cover, their starved faces
cut-out hearts and triangles, chins sharp enough
to slice bread. Their centre-partings are razor-ruled
in white, stretch from taut scalps. I gaze for hours
into the eyes of the only queue-waif who’s dared
to look up, my sister in literature, sent away
after her mother’s early death, to the bleakness
of boarding school, by an aunt who despises her.
I gorge on the gothic horror, the fodder of nightmares
that advances, gargoyle-faced as I turn each page:
the downcast eyes, the meagre capes, the cobblestone-
chill that seeps into boots unmended or too thin.
Flushed with deprivation or consumption, I crave
the cool hands of a friend, of a mother, When I return
the book to Aunt Ruby, handled with care, it is bone-clean,
unblemished; no blood, no sputum, no love.
Joint 3rd prize Frogmore Competition 2009
Published in the Frogmore Papers no 74