Souvenir

Mother;
a word pressed in the pattern
of blue and white bone china.
It holds the smell of English
marigolds and arnica.

I remember
a windowsill
littered with glass pots.
I looked for you like a lost
library card.

The sound of your sandals
felt like rain. You were
dense green swirls
on a wool carpet, oranges
in a net shopping bag,
the scent of warm rice.

Memories stick
like fridge magnets.
Blurred polaroids.
Doodles – a biro
thrown into a waste bin.
A dial tone.

Housekeeping

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Sarah-Jane’s poems can be read in various journals including Muddy River Poetry Review and the Wales Haiku Journal. Her poems have been shortlisted for the Haiku Foundation’s ‘Touchstone’ award, and the Canterbury Festival ‘Poet of the year’ award. She is an educator at Hereford College of Arts, UK and a researcher at Birmingham City University. Inspired by fairytales, nature, psychogeography and…

To And Fro

the iron
over bedsheets, his shirts,
as she stands three hours

hot poker of pain
in the small of her back,
lists what else to do,

take down window nets,
wash and iron,
vax front room,
lug it upstairs for bedroom,
carpets,
hoover front room,
lug it upstairs for bedroom
carpets,
clean windows inside
to and fro,
to and fro
polish beneath knick knacks
bought on holiday,
to and fro
strip and remake beds,
make his tea,
always meat and two veg

He arrives home and says,
“What have you ever done for me?”

My Mam Is

nothing if, not thorough.
Victorian reminder on a wall
full of telling aphorisms:

What will the neighbours say?
Our home shows us how
we treat ourselves.
Buff away grey clouds,

bring out the blue, make every
wood bell, crocus, daffodil
open their flowers today,
place a spruced up nest

for…

Imperfecta

I knew what I was doing when I swallowed the glass piano.
It’s still a heavy burden. I read books and watch PBS documentaries on Victorian women who also carried glass pianos.
“You read too much,” Jared tells me.
“Glass delusions are what they’re called.” I tell him.
“I know, Audrey,” he says.
I find something romantic about privileged women who swallowed glass pianos, like mine. The ennui they suffered sounds better than my depression, more fainting couch than therapist’s couch.
Jared packs his trumpet to leave for practice. We both know he’s going to sit in the corner coffee shop away from PBS and glass instruments. I’m going to stay home and protect this thing that squashes my guts, huddles against my ribs, perches on my now-empty uterus.
I used to play a real, glossy black piano, wearing a black empire-waist dress. Jared’s trumpet sang love…

Content warning: violence

1.

south carolina

every night after work in
the white community,
mother sits in the sparse kitchen holding a
handkerchief because the seagulls always come
to visit her face,

her hands are calloused from
years of washing linen & changing
diapers,
i mostly see her staring into vacant
spaces thinking of brother doing time
in prison after he was caught lifting at the whites owned shops down the block,
of father somewhere in the distant city
buried between the laps of a new mistress with new
promises of invincible things,

with her, i have come to know
that what we call love is sometimes
a misplaced notion, a beatified delusion, a wishful thinking
on our part because I have seen her
nursed her wounds, christened them after father’s name, hoping they become flowers growing from tender scars…

2.

RUPTURED

brown skin girl,
your body is a relic…

Welcome to our new project Mother/Service/Voice. 70 + contributors will explore this theme in a range of forms and styles and approaches. We launch this project in honor of Black History Month UK.

For October 2020 we invited UK poet Jenny Mitchell to develop a prompt for our New Works Series at Ice Floe Press (www.icefloepress.net). We held an open call for poets, prose writers (fiction, non- fiction), creators of visual work, hybrids and collaborations to submit unpublished work that examines the intersecting themes of ‘the Mother’, ‘Service’ and ‘Voice’.

Enjoy the results of this curation beginning Oct. 6, 2020 with new pieces every day for the duration of the month and into the month of November.

THE PROMPT:

Mother: Who are our mothers, our foremothers, our birth-mothers, our sacred/spiritual mothers? What sound/energy/emotion/history does ‘the mother’s voice’ (s) contain? Is it kind, stern, loving, beauteous, ugly, rageful, destructive, dynamic, undocumented…