Rosamund Taylor

Milly-Molly-Mandy Smokes on the Downs

  After Joyce Lankester Brisley

 Want to go for a drive?
My third day back: Susan hung
over the gate, tall now,
and plump as suet pudding.
I watched her hands on the gears,
quick and sure: she’d driven ambulances.
She winked, held out a cigarette,
as the fields stretched ahead
wet enough to swim in. I lit it for her,  

then I was on the ward. A soldier
who’d lost both his arms rolled
his torso away from me. He refused
the gruel I spooned, even the cigarette
I held to his lips. Smoke and fog:
no colours left now, no brooks,
blackberries, and no boys
to take me fishing. Far out  

on the downlands, we stopped. 
The glass fogged. I said, Billy and I
used to look for fossils here.
She smiled: I know, I was jealous.
Her hair shone bright as a duckling
as she passed me another cigarette.
This time I drew on it. Her fingers
lingered on my wrist. I imagined  

we were on our way home
from the pictures, that I was her girl.
The press of mouth and breath
hung between us like a dream —
how dreams used to be,
full of chance and possibility.

Rosamund Taylor is a poet from Dublin. She won The London Magazine Poetry Prize in 2020, and the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry in 2017. In 2021, her poems appeared in Fourteen Poems, Poetry Ireland Review and The Rialto, as well as in four anthologies, including Queering the Green: Post-2000s Queer Irish Poetry (Lifeboat Press) and Out of Time: Poems from the Climate Emergency (Valley Press). Her first collection, In Her Jaws, will be published by Banshee Press in May 2022.