Mill Road

Lisa Megraw Mill Road

You are coiled snakes escaping mud-banked mattresses, sofas left to sag against bins;

birds with peaty eyes who sit on crooked roofs under grey skies that run on like rivers.

You are fish and mash on a plate in a dimly lit cafe with a man’s mouth wrapped around a fork

and a woman who stares at a picture of sycamores hanging above the till. They are waiting for the wave

of silence to break while someone outside talks to the shell of a phone booth because no one will spare any change

and he has so much he’s bursting to say. You are the crowds of students at The Bell and Whistle, gutters

that smell of cloves, the wife who wrote in black kohl over the door of the barber’s shop to ‘be careful

the road is iced’, but still the taxis pull up like kippers to be flipped back into grey-green waters,

their after-dark scales slippery as music over the flush of headlights. Later,

you are the boy wearing a wool hat who brushes a snow-crusted bench and pulls out a moleskin notebook;

the woman in the cafe who has eaten enough silence and left; and the man who was rattled but now leans

against an ATM singing just above a whisper, something simple but fragrant as winter.