Ruth Fainlight

A bed of them looks like a dressing-room backstage after the chorus changed costume,

ruffled heaps of papery orange petticoats and slick pink satin bodices.

Every petal’s base is marked with the same confident black smear as a painted eyelid

and the frill of jostling purple anthers sifts a powdery kohl that clogs the lashes

shading watchful glances from dilating pupils, as though all...

Like Manet’s ‘Olympe’, naked in the afternoon heat and manilla-shaded light, my aunt lay on the green watered-silk of her bedspread. Smooth hair, proud head, short but shapely legs and high breasts were so much the same as the painting I had just fallen in love with, that I faltered, still half in the doorway, almost afraid to enter.

Through one moted beam that cut across...

My fuchsia is a middle-aged woman who’s had fourteen children, and though she could do it again, she’s rather tired.

All through the summer, new blooms. I’m amazed. Yet the purple and crimson have paled. Some leaves are yellowed or withering.

The new buds look weaker and smaller, like menopause babies. But still she’s a gallant fine creature performing her function.

...

A slow-motion explosion is what my mouth’s become, front teeth thrusting forward at impossible angles. Incisors once in satisfactory alignment cruelly slice through lips and tongue, and molars grind each other into powder. Though it took almost thirty years for them to drift so far apart, the pace accelerates. My mouth contains meteors and molecules, the splintered bones of mastodons,...

Bare winter trees in silhouette against a clear cold turquoise sky just after sunset: during the war, at my aunt’s house in Virginia, I tried to draw them – trees like these in England which she never saw – and now, trees in my garden make me feel the first true pang of grief since her death.

Between the wash-tubs and storecupboards filled with pickled peaches and grape-jam,...