After all that time I could have ended up thinking I had invented you, but I dived and found your old letters from Cornwall. Glued together they form a lifebelt which inflates when I sigh. Desperately warm was the microclimate on the Isles of Scilly, but once back in cold London, I took a […]
Lady Di Died Yesterday
Imagine, it’s morning, my rusty Raleigh hissing with anger, sliding on Station Road, darting along by red-eyed Cambrians who are crying for Lady Spencer. If nothing ever changed the trains would have run late, but that day the tea-lady shook her old wig no. Punting was only for tourists and undergrads; writing, grading, […]
A Bouquet of Ephemerals
On your first day among us, you ate my Barbie doll. I cried when I saw the pink leg sticking out of your mouth, without knowing it would only be a few years until I buried that one-legged doll with you. Born a Saint Bernard you felt at home among our garden blooms. […]
Invisible Mothers
Moriana: where they are from their mothers’s shadow is a sheet of tracing paper on either translucent side a mother and a daughter can neither be separated nor look at each other. * Argia: where she is from mothers have no warmth no smiles no skin nothing that makes them seem mothers except […]
Weaning
It’s in hunger that I write best about you, mother when you don’t look above my shoulder presentable you are absent or else you appear your mad gaze searching for my readiness to admire but I was not born to approve of you, mother. It’s in hunger that I remember best how your […]
The Grandmother of
Who knows my grandmother? Who remembers her? asks the girl who doesn’t have memories to remember her for. All that is left of her is that she is the grandmother of the girl. Of course there have been words too narrative attempts to tell the separation the dreams the unknown death in an […]