When my boyfriend and I were buying our first house, the sale nearly fell through because there was Japanese knotweed in the garden. The bamboo canes seemed to be growing through everything, every document, every solicitors’ meeting.

It’s almost impossible to kill. Every few months a man in a red boiler suit turns up, tells us to get the animals inside, scorches the earth where it’s grown, looks beneath shrubs, under hedgerows, for places it might have hidden itself. You treat it, cut down the dead sticks, burn them, but the roots remain; beneath the topsoil and the layers of muck, three metres deep, seven metres long, infiltrating the whole of the lawn and the flower beds.

Sometimes at night, both of us bound tight in our bed, I think I can hear it stretching, threatening to wake up, to grow through the walls.

sometimes I go out with an urge to hurt it
put my boot to the soft belly
of rotted stump    and the funghi    unkempt
sprung up from the mossy ground and flung
like scabs across the lawn   sometimes I need
the sound of something pulled up from the roots
and tossed aside       most days I’m out with loppers
to cut down the ambitions of the shrubs        when I
was in school there was a game    to throw
a punch as fast as you could and stop
an inch from someone’s face    I tried it
once with mum            tonight in the dusk light
a final effort of the muscles      the snapping
crunching sound of something breaking

the neighbour says the old man has been dead
so long he’s decomposed    no one can tell
what did for him in the end       the kid
over the road says he was murdered
hence the police car    parked as though guarding
someone of importance      a fortnight on
all the windows are open   the tongue
of the garage door rolled back   open mouth
full of boxes   the neighbour comes to say
he has two options for the cockerels
a blacked-out box so they never know dawn
and won’t wake up   or else a collar
wrapped around their throat to stop their crowing
to break their necks if they try and scream

each evening I go out through the parched grass
to the raspberries and blackberries
reach through the netting to handle each one
in their swelling   ripe as the noses of drunks
I take them between my fingers
twist and pull   carry them back to the house
the neighbour spots me   he has a new trophy
a live-in lad to share the house with his mother
the neighbour walks him   topless and smiling   along
the path at the top of the gardens
he plays with the dog       he doesn’t talk much
and I’m thinking of Pozzo  pulling
Lucky behind him   one moment dancing
the next moment mute      it’s like he’s entangled

the neighbour thinks someone is stealing
his chickens   that one has been left high
on a branch in warning      the neighbour
thinks a dog is after his chickens
or someone has trained a dog to steal
and a man is standing in the brook
with a sack     I sigh   say rumour spreads
too quickly through this street      another
neighbour asks if we’ve been growing weed
or if the other neighbours have
where is that smell coming from? they squeal
pulling up the floorboards one by one
weeks later   chicken heads like loose golf balls
in the woods    dog tracks in the early snow

sometimes my curiosity is a child
that wants to hunt things     like now   as I lever up
a square of the flagstone path   and find panic
a colony of ants   iron filings scattering
as they grab their small white eggs   and pupa
and their young   and run for cover underground
and in the midst of all their fizz and tumble
a family of translucent slugs
slowly rousing themselves from being curled in
on one another      they seem weary
and who can blame them      hiding from the world
and here I am   pulling off their roof   staring
as the ants carry off the ghosts of their future selves
and I close the lid of the path back down on them

the year of no touch   the garden shaggy
and unkempt   autumn storms having turned leaves
to string and that night you kissed me
uncertain as drizzle   lips dewed and hungry
and each time I think we’ve reached the edge of us
together – like that time in the middle
of the Hope Valley   when I made up my mind
to leave you   when the lit windows of each house
the train passed broke my heart
it was lambing season   late but barely dark
innocent marionettes in womb blood
coming out into the night – each time like that
we feel our way back    and coming home late
you greet me as though newly arrived

Artwork © omnos