Cassandra Dickinson: Three Poems

Ukrainian Baba

My grandmother held the sun in her hands

Her palms had touched the world,

Skin tough from breaking off big chunks of it like bread,

That she savoured through her starving years.

At five years old, I was convinced of their magic,

I held them tight, turning each over like a compass

To find secret entry into a land that was lost to me.

In her palms, I read fairy tales in the deep lines,

That led like narrow paths into the past.

She whispered spells into my ear,

In a language I could barely understand

“Ya tebe lyublyu”,

Those words I knew by heart.

I traced the shallow ridges of her nail beds,

Stained beetroot pink from a lifetime of borscht

And tried to count the scars that a keen knife had left

On the bed of her palm, she used for a chopping board.

In winter, those hands would crack, calloused and coarse

With the fragrance of earth from the garden

Or the perfume of her favourite soap

Carved like little roses that she kept in the cupboard in a bouquet of towels.

Red Shoes

With every step she takes, they pinch and bite her flesh,

She bites back, teeth on teeth but doesn’t let her discomfort slip—

From her lips onto the smooth confidence she wears in

Shades of crimson stretched out symmetrically across her face.

Teetering on the edge of a razorblade, one heeled foot in front of the other

In the company of strangers, she tilts her head back and laughs,

Greets the slobbering smiles of men with a flutter of long lashes,

Sips sorrowfully at champagne in a murder of muttering women

And ignores the blood trickling to her toes.

Smoke

It was like setting fire after a flood.

I gathered the leaves, piling them

high on the sodden ground, wringing

out the bark you’d found—it crumbled

in my hands. Together we moved,

collecting stones and placing them

side by side, circling the kindling—

nothing wants a spark like the promise

of rain. You scrounged for tinder and I

for flint, the clouds damp and dribbling.

In a smoky sky we dissolved like ash.

In the gathering dark, in the last embers

I saw us clearly: I was all fire,

you were only smoke.

Cassandra Dickinson