My Mother

She said the cornflake cake made her day,

she said a man cannot be blamed for being

unfaithful: his heart is not in tune with his

extremities and it’s just the way his body

chemistry is. She said all sorts of things.

We saw a duck pond and a man with a tub

of maggots and a tub of sweet corn, we saw

the walled garden and the old-fashioned library

in the park, stopped for a cup of tea in a cafe

where we had the cornflake cake cut into halves

with the handle of a plastic fork. We saw yellow

crocuses growing in a ring around a naked tree,

the sky showing in purple triangles between

the branches. We looked in the window

of Butterworth’s at the bikes: they were beautiful,

all of them. Gorgeous, she said. The sun was

pushing through the iced air and landing on us

on our heads and our shoulders and the backs

of our legs. We bought nail varnish remover

from Wilko’s, a bath sheet, and two Diet Cokes.

She said she’d been talking to Jesus and God

because she didn’t want to go to hell, although,

she said, correctly, we’ve been through hell

already, haven’t we. She said a woman should

know her place, should wait. She lit a cigarette.