trout

The Call

Sonya Yelich

There is nothing extraordinary about her fallout –
other than the decline of soup making in the early stages
& the over heating of the lean-to kitchen in summer
from an oven she used to dry the mank gussets of her underpants –
when a clothesline would've done.

There is the unremarkable call to the police from the curly
wire of her telephone – about an attacker who ransacked her.
And the sirens she watched with the ache of breasts at the window.
Men arriving with batons. The doorframe –
where she had arranged cotton tripwires.

Immediately they would have seen her cane. There would have been
a smell of apple decay. Weevils would have stopped in the flour canisters.
And someone will definitely have noticed the enamel pale used for
collecting lone drops of water. The house was not short of taps.
The locks had tape.

She would've been a slow animal. The men's uniforms were crisp
& used to this. She might have forgotten the name of the day. The year
her husband's plane fell. The foreshore she mounted with her infant son.
Plots of people top to toe. And the men would have realised the task that night –
the fecula matter in the bathtub – a give away.