The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Anne Marie Fyfe

Curacao Dusk

A plane flies off a map’s edge
today. At the console, O’Hara inhales
the ozone of Curacao dusk.
Manilla postcards, weightless with
preprinted greetings, flutter in confined
space, franked, illegibly signed.
The manifest’s well under payload.
Faces in cabin windows are graven
waxy masks, their sightlines
uninterrupted by pitchy flights
of eastbound ebony swans.
The hold’s a chaos of tethered
cockatiels, small gods from Surinam.
Bursting valises disgorge wrist-watches,
standby parachutes, a crushed trumpeter’s
mute. The co-pilot stows
isobar charts, taps the compass
twice for luck: he mouths a childhood
formula under clearwater skies
before resuming routine announcements
to the remanants of a cabin crew.

Anne Marie Fyfe is a freelance teacher of literature and creative writing, and has organised the Coffee House Poetry reading series at The Troubadour in London’s Earls Court since 1997. Born in Cushendall, County Antrim, she now lives in West London. A former English lecturer, her research on ’Women and Mother Ireland’ appeared in ’Image and Power’ (Longman, 1995). In 2003 she was writer in residence at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and Tonbridge Arts Festival. Her collections are ’Late Crossing’ (Rockingham, 1999) and ’Tickets from a Blank Window’ (Rockingham, 2002). She was a recipient of an Authors’ Foundation award in 2003 towards work on her third poetry collection, ’Carnival Red on Tuesdays’, which is due later this year.