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siphoning   habitual catalogue of the day, intro ft blossom fallen from a gated property and crisping on the pavement’s piss-streaked sun, kicked out of shape by the advance of a woman whose feet pass quickly then recede in the distance soon followed by a girl whose shoulders curl a phonetic c as she frowns (at feet/blossom/pavement) at which point the narrative corrects the woman as Mother & the latter grammar as Disobedient Daughter, and the world shakes off its hope of distance to assume a familiar shape: in which the blossom becomes fallout of some unseen conflict & we the barely treading water, like toothless children bobbing for apples & ushering worlds round their axes       What Genie Got   She got it in the chest like the thump of Elijah, awoke one morning to the trumpet of her mother, its mouthpiece fused to the notch above her sternum All Genie knew was that she woke up for school, and saw the duvet rising sharply between her breasts, its worn-out cotton an ascending minaret that tugged itself back in reverence, declaring the terrible instrument in matrilineal splendour Genie didn’t touch or caress its tubulation, to try & still its cries, but as she breathed out slowly the trumpet started yelling so that cracks began to scale the walls, each one spawning derivatives as she fought with the trumpet for air Genie held her breath and the artex started raining   The year processed in discord Genie became adept at the opposite of breathing & made very little sound at all But her mother’s orchestra had other plans: her gangs of woodwind would heckle from buildings through menacing throats of gargoyles, while brassy-eyed buttons of anonymous instruments winked like fish skins from hedges They always seemed to meet her at the importunest of moments: on Saturdays spent working at hotel wedding functions, when the sudden exhalation of an untuned celesta might shatter her tray of champagne flutes; or the time she tried to kiss Serina behind the privacy of her locker, only to find it filled with cymbals, stacked like dry-stone making horizontal purdahs of the sweetly staling air It was only the one cymbal that slipped out of line, but Serina backed away, unravelled by its timbre Genie was left in the reverberant air, breathing in the lustful geometry of lockers; the plasterboard walls of discoloured posters and fading acne of blu-tack; the fluids that