Welcoming the Slaughter, a poem on love and breakdown

Ben and Jane (an extract)

Jane has boxes for everything.

She keeps them under the bed,

In the bedroom of the house

In her head.

Her mother gave her the boxes;

Label them carefully, she said.

What kind of boxes? Egg boxes?

Tea chests?  Crates? 

She was anxious to get it right.

If you like. 

What kind of guidance was that?

Her first box was Anxiety:

A shoe box, big enough for boots;

They’d been in a sale;

They chafed her heels.

The lid didn’t fit.

 

She’d found the house in a memory,

Though she couldn’t remember it.

The front door,

Fanlighted, letter-boxed,

Its number an opaque code,

Leads to the stairs,

And off the landing is the bedroom,

Cluttered with boxes.

There is a window,

Its sill cluttered with boxes.

Light streams against the pane,

But the view is a blank,

As if the house were in a carwash.

 

The other rooms feel forbidding. 

She thinks there are lodgers,

Whom she may have met,

Or would have liked to.

Sometimes,

She hears their voices,

Soft, sociable noises,

The clink of glasses,

Murmured laughter;

 

Sometimes,

A nervous greeting:

The bleating of a small animal,

Welcoming the slaughter.

 

Other times,

When alone,

She sits on the bed

And imagines herself crying,

Wanting a mother for the daughter.