Screening
Margaret Moores (Massey University)
I always wore a bra once my mother had bought me one. I didn’t like the workmen whistling and calling. Every time I go to Farmers I walk through aisles of pink and petticoats. I had imagined a daughter. The nurse in the breast screening trailer has a South African accent. I want to ask her how to say koeksusters. Every day I drive past a sign on the road: Biltong, droewars, koeksusters. I don’t mind being squashed flat between glass plates. It hurts, but not like. Perhaps uncomfortable is a better word. My son’s room is papered in tattered posters of naked women with enormous breasts. If I don’t like it, I shouldn’t look. I imagine being homesick for something I cannot yet pronounce. A burst of music and a flickering light. There was a variety of flowering apple at the front gate with tiny fruit that were perfect for a doll. In twilight the blossoms glowed like petticoats while all around the sound of pot lids and scraping and starlings in the trees by the river. The air as cool as glass plates. My father would take us outside to look for satellites. In the albums, the ones when there were still six. Each of us wearing a green dress with a sash. I was reading Austen and then Bronte, when I got to Zola I would be finished.
Margaret Moores was a bookseller for many years but now works as a publisher’s sales representative. She is currently a student in the Master of Creative Writing programme at Massey University. Her poems have been published in Shot Glass Journal, blackmail press, Meniscus and in Poetry New Zealand Year Books 1 and 2.
