There were Chinese lanterns at New Year
when it was so cold the fireworks froze in the air,
bursts of red and silver beside the dazzling lights
of London. From our perch on Parliament Hill
we stood, anonymous in the crowd,
looking down at the giddy world
and at the final minute of the year it
was just you and I
and then it started to snow.
Families let off the slow moving lanterns,
children held them tight in their hands- but
they were pulling, pulling
caught by the night wind, their ghostly silhouettes
drifted up and up,
til they became stars themselves to us.
They were moments of peace against the
busy noise of the city,
softly golden, trustingly floating further and further.
I didn't know that you too would soon be gone
and nothing I could say would change your mind.

If I had thought to then
I would have made a wish on each lantern I saw
rising like a thousand spirit kings above the earth.
I would have wished and wished,
and sent my heart out there too:

I will always remember
the soft chills of snow beginning to fall
and the quiet beauty of those Chinese lanterns.
I will remember your hand slipping into mine,
and the silent slide of that year
into the past, yes,
I will remember.

First, garlic.

Dig your nails into its flaking paper,
pink and beige like magnolia petals parched
in the gutter.
Peel back the skin and crush
the weighted bud
with the heel of your hand on your favourite knife.
It has been waiting for this.
The thick expectent smell sits up on the chopping board,
looks up at you like an old friend.
It has burrowed itself into the skin of your hands and lingers there

it will not be washed away, instead
it quietly clings to your fingers, flavouring
letters on your keyboard, the edge of the banister,
every light switch in the house.

The pulped clove is scattered into a scraped frying pan,
your grandmother's; it was never non-stick.
The stuck parts were always the best bit,
and so it goes,
the oil and creamy crumbs find the same spots,
engineered over forty years.
Some were accidents. All were happy.
Yours were ambition-led experiments.
The thumbs in the brown recipe book
were never your thumbs,
the dried-out sedimentary edges
were never your mishaps
but still it is a bible of sorts,
providing answers but never asking questions.

Later after dinner when everything is cleared away
and nobody can tell that you had been cooking at all
bring your fingertips to your nose
and inhale
the remaining relic of your meal,
a letter to yourself,
the end notes enduring but faint
now, lastly
lastly
garlic.

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.

Of all the stories we tell ourselves
late at night
before bed, before sleep
speaking solemnly into the dark
There were gales
the night you were born
the family folklore
unpacked, gently handled
exclaimed over again and again
every retelling a buff to bring out the shine-

Yes there are some stories we tell
and others we keep
the deep
hints and murmurs of
What Really Happened.
The indelicate hows and whys
of your sixteen year old self giving birth
on the bathroom floor.
There are more
than two sides to this tale.
More corners, more edges: a prism
reflecting light at any angle.
But all of this was your own making.

Those years were carefully picked over,
censored, books with whole chapters
black struck through.
No, these are not
the halcyon echoes of your childhood-
no gold topped milk, no
reading by the light in the hall.
No cast iron, no Christmas mornings.
No hedgerows, no collecting the hens at dusk.

These are the bitter pips,
the hanging nails and paper cuts.
The inedible core of the matter:
What was said to you was said.
What was done to you was done.

And you
you were always too clever by half
for the skimmed, six-of-one versions
of events,
played out like lazy Sunday morning television.
The truth
is always smaller
and greyer than we imagine. We think
of memories as ribbons tying the past together,
but for you
they are stones filling up your pockets
and every year
the river runs a little higher.

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.

I take Jack to pick blackberries.

I’d spotted them earlier in the hedge
down the lane and over 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  
like children sitting on a gate.
Rosehips and sloes peep yet
through the leaves, biding their time.  

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

And oh how the fattest fall just so
into your hand,
as if they have been waiting

Soft bubbles bursting with juice
Our fingers and chins
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 furthest blackberries just
beyond my reach.

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.

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