Three poems

By Jane Murray Bird

Tricked

Nine months since we wassailed

away together toasting forked

branches with the blood of your son,

whichever way the wind falls, 

autumn stalks this eve.

Inside, thawed to the core,

that marzipan plan waits out

the crossed sticks of winter.

Workhorse, grafter, but after 

six springs, genealogy brings 

back the tiny wise crabbles of 

Tian Shan, far from the tree. 

Tributary to Elizabeth Siddal

Ophelia rides a rusty motorbike

sticklebacked, tickled by willows 

in the Hogsmill. Me and her meander

too far from the Thames for remembrance

(last train from Waterloo 2202.)

We paint queenfisher blue on the Watersedge 

Estate where once Millais had his Way and 

she lay: a mused with pneumonia from the cold 

baths and watery stares of long dead men.

Unearthed

I 

Stole from the charity shop, or 

rather rescued from the bins since

we weren’t allowed to sell them:

one skin, big red brush, legs

hanging limply and glass-eyed 

head lolling chicly over one shoulder

like my cats sleep each night 

on the back of the sofa. An accessory

that did not pretend to be anything

other than a dead body. Only a 

set of silver snare jaws on one paw

might have made it more honest. 

I brought it home for the feel 

of that thick furred tail between my

fingers, but the cats bottled, backed up

and hissed, would not come to bed.

II

Moving the water butt at the end

of the garden revealed the curled

skeleton of a cub wormed clean 

with only tiny black bean nose 

and whiskers attached. There were 

no visible bone breaks from impact 

or ways to have become trapped,

perhaps it was just a safe place 

to die of hunger or poison or infection,

a few metres from meddling fingers, 

cat cages, interfering oral syringes.

I remembered a year ago when my fearless

feral had refused to go outside 

for days, sniffed and retreated to his bed, 

waiting for the scent-change of death.

III

December morning, frozen at the kerb,

a vixen caught mid-run. No blood, not

even from a nostril – orange eyes open,

fixed, like a perfectly executed piece

of taxidermy. Later, when I am asked 

why I am carrying a dead fox, I will

explain that she was just too beautiful 

to leave lying in the gutter. Her black 

stockinged limbs still reached beyond 

the bumper as I slid her in - next to the turkey

- like an Egyptian cat, ready for her next life.

A note in glitter on sticky pink paper:

This is just to say 

there’s a fox in the freezer.

Jane Murray Bird studied creative writing with the Open University in Scotland, gaining a First Class Honours degree. Her work has appeared in magazines including Magma, Mslexia, Under the Radar, Prole and Hippocampus. She lives by the sea in Edinburgh and is equal parts flâneuse and garden hermitess.