‘To remember everything is a form of madness’ – Brian Friel

Belly sips peppermint tea, perching

with scabbed elbows on the edge

of a couch, the skin around her lips

and the ends of fingertips give into how cold

hunger rips through flesh and fat, through

muscle until the banging drum in her cage weakens

and blood recedes from all extremities,

to eventually settle on the shore with a cup

of mint tea and a sinewy piece of orange for lunch.

Mind stands facing the yellow paper, her pupils

retract and relax with the spiralling hues of ochre

branches twisting and turning around each other.

Occasionally a little chaffinch can be spotted

in the pattern, a small mouth open to sing or to beg

its absent carer for food. The pattern is a pattern.

Mind knows this - but there’s no familiarity in it,

the same boughs embrace the walls of the room.

Mind gets tired of playing hide and seek with a bird.

Memory cares for both Belly and Mind, she files splintered

nails down to their beds daily, so Mind won’t scratch anymore

holes in the wallpaper and Belly won’t pick the flesh

from her elbows as a gravedigger picks at the soil of a new plot

with a shovel. She boils the kettle once an hour for tea.

Her favourite hobby is brushing the hair that grips into Belly’s scalp,

while she watches Mind look for a bird and picks out the

matted clumps with her hands because Belly is very sensitive.

She could change the wallpaper or get another flavour of tea,

but she loves her sisters.