☀ Today's Poem: "Me and my sister" Lucy Burnett

My gran still wrings the neck
of the pre-plucked chook that flew away
and my mother nearly dying.

She is only young, grandmother,
and cannot know much better.

I have been bad, and was here, to be there,
not far from home, only three years old,
three miles from home and the sudden
all-consuming noise has just created (silence).

I'm lying in a white bed bigger than my unformed
knowledge of death while my mother has become
the inverse of herself — wearing all her organs
from the outside in. We are already stationary.
There is a knocking on the window.
There is a child in the back. I cannot breathe.
It is dark, and somebody is knocking at the window
and the most awful noise has just created silence.
There is a child in the back and I cannot breathe
and then was nothing, then, but nothing.

The steering wheel has been embedded in the future
of my mother's spine. We are stopped. I am alone.
It is black and white and long and I must forget
the way the car bonnet cut through my mother's line of sight.

I cried and cried, but still you did not answer me.

My gran still wrings the neck of pre-plucked choock
that flew away and the noise was awful. I must have been
so bad, but she is young, grandmother, and cannot know much better.