The Ofi Press Magazine

By Amy Ekins, (UK) Published in Issue 28

Amy Ekins is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, a project manager for a publishing company, and is currently being mentored by poet Simon Jenner. She is a graduate from MRes Creative Writing at Northumbria University, for which she was awarded the university's fee-waiver scholarship, and currently lives in Gateshead with her fiancée, and two beautiful guinea pigs.

I suck the sleeve of my cardigan, then
thumb the buttons – half pearls, sewn
by my grandmother, taken
from a raffia box on her dresser, where
she keeps her odds and ends, and
the threads of her memory

(fine as they are now, and slipping
through the seams).

There are ruffles on my socks, and
pleats on my skirt, which catch blades
of grass as I pass the mower ­– a father
of a friend, a lover of someone else’s
mother. He tips his baseball cap
when he passes, in a flurry of green.

The collar of my blouse is pinned
with a brooch my mother found

beneath a sycamore, though maybe
that’s just folklore, and she stole it.

I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s pincers
for fingers, and they criss-cross the pockets
of bin-men and fine men, and drop it all
into a paisley print pinnie.

I am a pin-cushion, stuck with the spare parts
of family, and of strangers, and I spin
like a jewellery box ballerina,
getting tangled in the pendant of a doctor
my mother once remedied.