The Ofi Press Magazine

Poems by Angela Readman (UK)

Published in The Ofi Press issue 36.

Sorry: an assay

Come, arrive on another mother’s invitation,

an ugly girl spattered in lace, blood

on a dress with a price tag on the neck.

Your breath stinks of the gas ring I left on

while everyone slept. You’re spit on my lips

sticking to China dolls, legs broken bones.

Did anyone tell you you sound like the snap

of a stitch no one made before the seam split?

The O of you is a loose button, rolls in us all.

You drip pale as the last of the milk, gape

more than the lid on the biscuit tin, air staled

in our mouths. Tick tock tick, I hear you,

a foot that won’t fit into a waterproof boot,

a slow hand on a Tom and Jerry watch. You

are a bad performance of Anne Frank,

the wishbone  I lost, the scab I should not

have picked. I love your cheap glue, bubblegum

stuck in my hair, your poultice bound around

the silver scar of a porcelain milkmaid

with a slanted head. I have used your sticky tape

on a hole on my water wings and still sank.

Here, sit back, eat the scraps I keep asking for,

the charred toast I scrape with your knife. Drink

a glass of water attending a room after it burnt down.

I cling to your skirts, a woman on fire, racing back

into the house, searching for something to save,

the mortar we dab at our crumbling walls.

Can you stop us falling? Sorry, you are just

a word I am told I don’t know the meaning of. 

It was the end of love. Our mouths knew it,

whispering the news. Strawberries dropped

to the street, rolled in the gutters with sighs.

Black clothes dye spilled ink onto late August.

The sky built a slate roof over our heads.

I saw newsprint in the veins of my wrists, rivers

full of women drinking poison-laced tears.

Our summer skirts were used tissues,

dropped from rooftops into strange arms.

Girls filed past the talcumed coffin, pale,

powdered by ground smiles, hope chests shut.

We lay poems, lone gloves onto the lover’s lap

for his last ride, wept dunes for the sheik

in our wombs unpitching a silk tent.

It was the end of love we knew as well as our pillow,

the world’s breast reverberated to the words

one man never said.  Our factory girl lips licked

a name, ripped it into red velvet strips, cries torn

from mouths making stringy bandages for the soul.

We died, and died, and went home to stare

at our mothers chopping onions and pegging laundry.

Quietly, they drew a line through summer, hung

their smalls, pumpky, broekie, panteleta, at half mast.