Her Inheritance
By Emily Berry
The day came and I was sponging twenty years of dust
from a green clock to avoid you, knee-deep in first editions
of Iris Murdoch and your name on the flyleaf of every one;
was only red-eyed over onions, waiting for the boy I’d cooked for
to turn up and shift old champagne boxes in the name of love;
was calling you ‘some dead woman’ as if you were only objects
where your hands had touched them; was laughing, despite you,
with this boy you’ll never meet, this boy who likes these cheeks
you handed down, who had nothing to say, he said, and held me
as if it mattered now. And I was grown up, with your face on,
heating spice after spice to smoke out the smell of books, to burn
the taste buds off this bitten tongue, avoid ever speaking of you.
