While we drive through the Yorkshire Dales

While we drive through the Yorkshire Dales,

Me, carsick in the back,

We marry.

I wear a dress as soft and dramatic as a limestone ledge.

I hold a field of poppies.

Luminous against the hill.

We build a house a day.

We have children, one curly and dark like you,

With your grasp of logic and and spatial sense.

The other slightly strange and obsessed with words.

They grow. Quickly actually,

While we wheel through a dizzying buffet of careers,

Some lucrative, successful, ending in glossy hair

BBQs, dogs, I glimpse a pool.

Others are only visible through a council estate window,

Or don’t exist at all and are just Welfare State thoughts.

Dancefloors and endless weekends.

And all the while your mother points out cream tea opportunities,

And you snooze, slack-jawed, unaware of

the soft, luminous limestone dress in my head.

Two Girls in English Moonlight Place a Bet

“OK I’m ready. Don’t move - I’m starting now.”

We look at the moon. I try not to breathe. Every exhale is a chair dragged across a room. My hair falls across my shoulders, a cacophony.

I can hear Clare’s mind throbbing like a dancefloor. The lawn creaks. The stars feedback like live, unconnected cables.

A full minute passes in darkness. He lifts his head to signify the end of the test.

Emptying my lungs, I am all noise. Clare takes a grateful rasp on her cigarette.

“What do you think the reading was? How many decibels are you?”

The answer makes no difference. Clare won a million pounds.