I S S U E  8

Rebecca Goss

Girl at the End of the Track

with two pairs of jeans, rammed
in a paper bag, splitting, and a fury
so palpable birds felt it.

Her leaving not yet an absence,
not yet felt in the din.
She had made her half-escape,

a sharp bend beckoning.
Determined to step beyond
the oak, the gate, and forsake this place.

Raised in feral fervour, a family’s
clamour, her awkward fit into the pack.
And the wait felt everlasting

before her mother came
car stuffed with siblings,
the wobble of their heads

as tyres sunk into every pothole
and rose up again. The passenger door
pushed open in surrender,

the gesture saying
don’t leave us now, not yet.
Don’t rush into what you cannot stop.

Come home to be a girl a little longer.
Bring the hate and disappointment with you,
tuck it here beside the seat

and we’ll drive home for hot chocolate,
the kitchen table still strewn
with a week’s dishes, the day’s mud

on quarry tiles, dog splayed at the range,
because you will eventually run.
A city’s bidding, its will to shape you,

its gift of a temporary child. It will be there
that you learn about leaving,
and find yourself needing to come back.

Farm

Semi-derelict, ramshackle whimsy of a place. Our father
supplanting his family at the end of a track, huddle of empty
barns, field after field, no heating. Moving in at New Year,

my sister and I in kilts and patent Mary Janes, delivered
fresh from the pantomime by Grandma who slipped our feet
into plastic loaf bags fixed at the ankles with elastic bands,

waded us through the brown flood that led to the house.
Our mother ready, belly swollen with number four, beds made,
no curtains, thickest dark outside. The frequent tipping of us

out of the kitchen into barn, meadow, streams with their
fluctuating depths. Her trust in the countryside unwavering.
Snow coming down the valley in drifts. Our father attaching

sledge to tow bar, each of his children, in turn, skyrocketing
through cold. His erratic presence accepted. Our mother
loading us into the car at night, in rain, driving 300 yards

to get barn-stored coal. Cats who never came indoors. Fifty hens.
Dog roaming for bitches. The school bus dropping me at the end
of the track, older boys mooning from the rear window, my scarlet

shame at their pale arses. Walking in the back door, past our mother, her long phone calls, her crying. Children nestled, dirty, barefoot. Her shouting. Her transformations. Wellies kicked off to wear

the night sky on her feet: peep toe, diamanté studded heels, with bow. The most beautiful things I had seen in my life. The swirl
of her black silk Marilyn Monroe dress, her marriage almost over.

Rebecca Goss’s most recent collection is Girl (Carcanet/Northern House, 2019). She is the winner of the Sylvia Plath Prize 2022.