Eva H.D.

A Cherry-Red MG Roadster on Palmerston Sq, July, 2020

In the weeks after Savannah died,
I would see things
in their new, unholy
light, stripped, as you do –

here’s one, Palmerston Square
in the magic excrescence
the snow globe of glow that remains
of a sunless July evening,
I take the alley shortcut,
its mercenary efficiency
carving through the flanks of prim
brick, northwest toward Bathurst.

All the old nameless alleyways
have signposts now
like department stores.
As with affairs, being named
they end soon after. 

In the weeks after someone dies,
you think about them all the time
in the act of not thinking about them:
I’m not going to think about it, I think,
sharply intaking the filigree light, a scalpel –
it isn’t true, I think, clocking the
cherry-red MG, casually resplendent, in the drive –
I’m not thinking about her –
young girl practising flute in the window –
her then-ness or her not-ness,
jangle of hoops, tattoos and dotted cotton,
a shed snakeskin
her summer dress unmoored.

The young girl mouths her flute,
the notes wet the evening air.

Down the street, the knife-sharpener’s bell
warbles, nearing.  

She Awoke to the Rain and Falling Sheets of Fruit and Light

At night in the park the lightning strikes never,
because it's sheet lightning, bedsheet blanketing
the sky over the grounds where people have died and
failed to die and been memorialized and yearned at
and broken up with armslength long in a tree and forgotten.
All these things have happened in the park, and now the
lightning above it, and the rain that moves sideways
like a crab or two adults falling in love. 

The storm is not frightening anyone and the farmers
need the rain, the crops need it, and the bank accounts.
Most days, the park is full of women feeling things and observing
their own legs under harassed fringes of cutoff cotton.
They point their painted toenails, and the gloss catches
the light the way the sky does, wholly.

Everyone is from just up the road or just down the road
and so we meet in the park by uncoincidental chance to
catch up on bones broken and debts due or what's for lunch,
who's the favourite, when we'll see you. Soon, soon. We chit
and chat as is expected of us and look up and say, “Rain tonight.”

My friend sleeps in the grave of our banter in which he is
always awake. We just quote him as if he were alive,
we speak quickly, and move on. I move on the way a brigantine
that has run aground rocks and ruts in the silt at the bottom
of the channel: I heel, I tender. I take sides. I do not move on.

The sky is fluorescent, the raspberries on my toes
and mouth mashed, the rain is whipping the shingles
like they're a batting cage, like they did something
wrong, and the wind hoovers and yelps, strobe-violet
violent as a berry black bruise, each uppercut leaf wet
as a Norway spruce, or moss, or a woman. The sectional
leather couches in the condos are unmoved and the permanent
hair of the wives and the oil-on-canvas highway is a video
game still like the gallery-glazed wars of yesteryear, while tonight
in the halfcut park the sky is not split apart; merely pulsing

with replacement slides of another sky and another,
dis-colored, soused sapped aubergine, high-lit, fallen
fruit dark and fierce as dogteeth and oh that rain
that rain

Eva H.D. wrote Rotten Perfect Mouth, the poem "Bonedog" from I'm Thinking of Ending Things, and the short film Jackals & Fireflies. Her book The Natural Hustle is available for preorder here.