A lone slipper
Diary I wrote aged 18 (Unread, too piercing)
Battered biscuit tin I’d kept for years (in the hope it would prove useful (it didn’t))
Takeaway plastics (covered in grease and crusted rice)
Receipts (seconds after I am given them)
Poo explosion stained leggings aged 6-9 months at the Horniman Museum on 1st August 2020 (Jack’s 31st birthday)
My phone (an accident, obviously) into the bin at the hospital while I was in labour (retrieved soon after by a kindly HCA)
Green peppers from every meal in which they’ve been served to me (red and yellow are fine)
Opportunities (various, for various reasons)
A half used tube of e45 at least 5 years old (not mine, left by an ex boyfriend)
Eggshells, broken so a witch can’t use them for a sailboat (now I take care to leave them seaworthy)
Probably 20 pairs of cheap headphones (pocket knotted and wires exposed)
My potential (sorry Nan)
A makeup brush my toddler put in the (unflushed) toilet
Unopened bank statements (not even shredded)
Mystery unlabelled freezer meal (too scared to defrost, could be literally anything from anytime )
Tote bag stained with damson juice (used as emergency foraging bag one autumn, furtively collected from a stranger's driveway)
Old, bobbly tights (constricting yet baggy in all the wrong places)
Uni Laptop from 2012 (riddled with viruses from streaming tv shows by the hundred, and thousands of limewire songs)
My childhood dream to become a stain glass windows maker (not so much thrown away as abandoned due to not being a real career)
And the second slipper, found a week later

A summer evening in late June, light paling into dusk and colours lessen
Rattles from the kitchen as the ritual teas are prepared
I sit making a cardigan for a baby’s birth-

Knowing what it is to be a mother, I think of she who will carefully fasten the buttons
She who will, like me, cry at the news nowadays and lay her hands on a softly breathing body to find peace

Here I sit, fingers hitching and flicking  the yarn between needles
Knitting is a kind of prayer
Each stitch a supplication. Each turn a fresh appeal:
Let this mother meet her baby.
Let this mother meet herself, arriving

The prayer grows, row by row

This mothering is an unhealable wound
This mothering is a cardigan, made to fasten.

I take Jack to pick blackberries.

I’d spotted them earlier
down the lane and through a stile, brambles hanging heavy overhead

We each carry what we could find in the kitchen
Me a jug, he a plastic box.

The clutches of fruit perch on the hedge
Like children sat on a gate
Rosehips and hawthorn berries peep through leaves, biding their time.  

I say, look at the colours
Green then red and then
Finally,
shiny, glowing,
deepest purple

And how the fattest fall just so into your hand
As if they had been waiting

Soft bubbles bursting with juice
Our fingers turn pink

I like the tartest ones, sharp as a high summer sky.

And Jack only looks and me and smiles, nodding,
his hand finding
The blackberries just beyond my reach .

It is hard to get at the green kernel of anything.
Most truths do not lie open and ready, most
must be cracked with the teeth:
splintering shell and flaking husks
that lodge in the throat.
We know that the greasy
salted heart of the matter suffers too.
What is edible can be salvaged.
All else is waste.
(All day the secret sat in my mouth
heavy on my tongue, waiting to drop.)

In the dark, watching a glittering tower block
of sugar slowly fall into itself, collapsing
so deliciously into sublime black.
At the last, each crystal submits
to the swallowing tar, as they must,
as they were made to.

But all is not lost.
Shoulder to shoulder, the projection
flickering light and shadow onto our faces;
obscure features now
altered, now defined by the swinging loop
of the video.
(Who can find the pulse of a darkened room,
say for certain that this, yes
this was the exact place and
this was the exact moment-)
We emerge different people.

It is later.
I have dug to the bottom and eaten every one,
my pockets littered with
smooth hulls and grains, dust-
the day almost over, dusk
tucking away the grey skies
and all the city's lights dampened by
mist; it is too cold for this-

But words sometimes spill themselves:

Every year I take out my grief
and shake it,
try it on for size like a winter jacket.
It still fits and its pockets
are overflowing with shells.

It is a strange thing this, to consider
the world in hasty whirling throes
of autumnal grace, it walks a yellow
train of leaves, swathed in a veil
of misted mornings. The world
is marrying the season.

There is a potent force that gathers
like iron to iron, blood to blood:
it bids me to yield to its altering
wheeling might
purer than light

I have seen the heavens change
and a vapid world, without you in it.

This is a poem for you, my sister,
my mother
my grandmother. The girls I grew up with and
the women I grow with.
This is a poem for you,
and you- if you call yourself
a woman then yes, this poem is yours too.
But most of all, this is for my maybe daughter,
the girl that love with create, and then?
Who knows.
But this poem, I wrote it for her
because there are many things I wish weren't true
and so many things I wish I could do
to make a better world for her,
for us, for everybody’s daughters.

Firstly I hope you find your place, and I hope
it’s the prettiest place you've ever been-
I hope the air there tastes like peaches and cream
or whatever it is that makes you tingle.
I hope you get all the things you need, like
a person that makes you feel at home when they smile at you.
But also,
I hope that being alone won’t destroy you
I hope you have things that are yours only,
a favourite book you never lend out
a t shirt you only sleep in
a tree in the park you never take anybody to.
I hope you never feel so numb you walk away from love,
wherever it comes from.
I hope you’re never touched unless you want to be touched
I hope when you say yes, they’ll make you gasp and gasp.

Secondly, I hope you never look in the mirror
and feel sick at the sight of yourself, at the body
that carries you so beautifully and so well,
I hope you never rake at it with burning eyes
wishing every part were newer or altered or a better fit-
Believe me, you’ll never fit better.
I hope you save that hate
for a world that tells you ‘perfect’
is bland and flat and bleached,
an A4 sheet,
and not that perfect
is whatever you want it to be. Those aren't
stretch marks or laughter lines,
those are battle scars.
I hope you always eat when you’re hungry
that you never skip a meal to feel like you mean something.
You matter. You have always mattered.
And if anybody ever tells you that breaking a mirror
will leave you with seven years bad luck
then here’s a smash for all of us-
because what could be worse luck than believing your worth
can be found in the reflection of a looking glass?

Thirdly, I hope you raise your voice.
I hope you speak up,
talk back,
shout so loud
it’ll shake the gods down from the skies if there are
any still hiding. I hope you ignore anybody that tells you to
keep it down,
shut up,
stop making a fuss.
Your voice
is the most powerful thing you own.

But if you ever find that these hopes
are not enough,
that the world is still too rough,
My one-day daughter,
I will be here.
I am waiting for you.

I looked to the sky and it spelled out your
each gesture, the clouds were your hands,
moving with a silent ease to earth, spilling
down to touch me. There is much I wish
I could pluck from my heart and my bones
and construct for us our own city.

But it is you who will be building, and
maybe my words are the bricks you will use
new worlds, places of beauty and wonder.
I feel myself turning to gold, an ancient effigy
to all that love beholds; an advocate of you.
A living tribute to the glow that surrounds
my each move, it is all

all for you. I have stumbled from the cave
and found you there. But I do not think
a lifetime would be enough, (though you are  
a talisman that protects me from all ill wishes)
a lifetime is too short to return this charm
this hope: the shining compass
under my skin that points always to you.