Andie’s Place observations of gender dysphoria and beyond

Thirty steps to many hearts, hurts and
all these echoes spoken by doors

the singular, the anguished one-way
phone call that cannot reach

the hearts alight in family wholeness
voiced to one another

the child in protest between parents
both of whom would own their time

creaks and groans of lovers engaged
freely in orgasmic pursuit

the inconsolable belly-opening grief
poured to a door that’s closed

and the telephone that rings and rings
in the space where an absence lives

or dies unknown through unhearing walls
doors without keys just a letter-slot

wide enough when the police knock, bend
look, listen, with radio voices, leave

down thirty steps of unseen hearts, hopes,
hurts and lives spoken only by doors

2013 © Andie Davidson

He’s leaning from the window,
awkward, empties smoky lungs
withdraws into yellow light where
curtains are never drawn, and spare.

The elegant black lady never sees,
from her complicated kitchen whose
aromas might intrigue, across the
garden-patch five floors down.

Nor does she see the blue-lit room
twenty-four hours of daylight, green
through frosted glass and never a face
to person such evident herbal care.

Mum, close-cropped white, below,
two daughters who dance—her man
keeps his bicycle in the hall by the
post-it fridge, three floors up—or down.

Tabby patrols a kitchen-diner, left,
where a family of four revolves
in the same space I, alone, find crowded
missing loft, garden, conservatory, cat.

Between replaced windows, wood peels,
uncared, framing substitute curtains
condensation-stained, misfit, sad
suggestions of difficult, puzzling lives.

Assumptions lie behind each square,
portraits of those I see but never meet,
and I—new face in an old window—
perhaps ‘that strange lady on her own’.

In the end we all stop looking out,
we have come to carefully pretend
alone or cramped, that we are not
homing pigeons resting in our holes.

2014 © Andie Davidson