Cohabitation
Sometimes it was a bombed-out house
carpeted with the shards of a meagre life
that the family then walked over with bare feet
pretending, for the child, to find a thing to eat;
or an exterminating wind or wall of water,
crushing bodies into its bricks and mortar;
or an eye lined with sticky black flies,
and a hand too limp to flick them away;
or the hardened voice, the scarred face,
of a dazed child trailing a sad stump,
which drove them to the plot of wasteland
that used to be our rubbish dump.
We stare at them through bullet-proof glass.
Often they just blur into the background,
until a pillar of smoke, a blast of firecrackers,
remind us we live next to the favela.
Olivia McCannon is currently working on a new version of Balzac’s Old Goriot for Penguin Classics; she also translates plays for the Royal Court. Her poems and stories have appeared in Ambit, the Oxford Magazine and Modern Poetry in Translation. Awards include a Highly Commended in the Harper’s and Queen / Orange Prize for Fiction short story competition. She was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2005.
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