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20 October 2024

'Retriever' and 'Lost Gloss'

FREYA HARROD

RETRIEVER

​

You lost me a long time ago. I didn’t let you know that until that day we lay in the autumnal sun,

and I turned my eyes on you and gave you the truth.

​

It happened long before we met. You hated me more for that, your fingers shaking in the dew-

damp.

​

I told you this: the little girl I once was, ringlets blonde as golden light, was born joyful.

​

What I meant, though, is that there is a dream I have sometimes where she comes to meet me,

and there is something gone from her there already. She emerges wordless, fixated on a point

just beyond my view. As she approaches, I spot those eyes – I spot that she is watching, that she

is always watching, and observing, as if she can catch something that she hasn’t grasped yet.

​

We walk home together. She steps down my childhood road, and I am back in that house, with

the handful of years of what I have seen and known.

​

She climbs the stairs, enters her room, and sits by the window. A chaffinch song ebbs and flows

around her head, painting across her skin. She won’t turn her face to me again.

​

And that’s when I knew it, that she had been waiting for this moment the whole time. That she

waits for me there, every day, as the incredible light of dawn kisses her skin with decades of love,

and careens across the world beneath her watchful eye. For she has always been as she is;

waiting dutifully for my return, observing all that is around.

​

I’m sorry, but you lost me a long time ago. In that house, on that road, where the seasons pass

like folk tales.

​

Now I must collect for her hare-shaped clips, knickerbocker glory, filigree pears and sweet

mandarins. Cats with shining teeth and deep-ravined maws, and people with eyes which promise

of Universes outside of our entombed conception. We laugh so gruesomely that the moon arcs

from the sky for her, and eyes turn to her in terror of her ecstasy. They will try to stop it, and we

will seize them with the sensation we all had before we learnt to fear being known, before the

ego death of teenage self-perception, before we discovered what it is to kill our souls.

​

You looked at me as if I was mad, and I pointed to the woodland where she dances beneath the

trees.

​

I want her to see me in my all, and not stop looking, not until we both cannot be kept any longer.

Until Mother Earth must collapse our temple for fear that we will inspire in all others that vigorous

sugar-lipped laughter. The laughter that screams through our hearts and takes us back to a

vulnerable little creature, in a vulnerable little house, that we thought we left many many years

ago.

​

In this dream, I refuse to be small, curling into myself like a whippet into the wound of its own

introspection.

​

I will be as thick as a retriever; fat and golden.

​​

​***​

​​​​

LOST GLOSS

​

A wet-lashed sky with ivory scales

welcomes in the heaving mass. Writhing and damp, imperfectly formed.

Mackerel, hake and snapper, pungent with the algae-dark and grown from generations of

memory.

Once lithe with graceless discovery,

now cured and palatable. The kick hums in the throat forever.

 

Long-lost sentiments are swept away in echoes of landscapes past -

catching a glimpse of the grimy shadow line

where you were once smooth, impalpable.

Will you see my sweet-grass reedy eyes and cold purpled lips

and tell me I am delicious?

The remnants of beginning brim and pulse, twisting for touch

far beyond reach.

 

At the mouth, all that’s left is ahead and out, out, out.

Sardines, barramundi, sea bream,

nicked scales crooked with bearing the world,

bellies gorged,

forging ahead with dogged vision. I stumble into walls with a sense of wretched faith

that the body’s moaning beams are testament

to a life lived vivaciously.

 

Minnow, carp, cuttlefish,

miles away from the feral bearings of youth, I boil eggs and milk in an empty house.

Still thrashing from what lies in the muck behind,

a moment away from spoiling the faultless expanse

sparkling and shimmering ahead.

​

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