Three Poems
Natalie Crick Childless I lost six children here in the wood. Even now, I see bright hair flashes in pools of sun; babies’ hair. Gestures flake away warm and human, their pink light bleeding and peeling, falling like blessings. My womb rattles inside it’s cage: this body ungodly as an infant scream. I spin on my own spike. If I call, they might crawl out, death-gowns frilled at the neck, wet waxen feet. The moon has nowhere to go. I have been filling and emptying for years. Birthday Girl She is the most brittle thing. A wretched beauty with bird bone wrists hanging, tranquil over the chair-arm. Her eyes are glimmery pools under a bluey sky. She proffers a flake of hand, a love gift of whispery charm. Her mouth is very thin, lips turned to worms. As night falls they take her away, ghosted back into the laced dark entranced, reasonless as the vaporous unborn. Living Summer grows weary: a cold-hearted mother. Ants stir their eggs, grubs swell. This same dark room echoes and trembles. How easily we are forgotten. In these yellow houses we wilt and fade. We slip loose our bones and drift to another day, quietly ignored like wandering ghosts. Folk crawl and glare as if this husk of a house were theirs. I live alone like a body in a morgue, rouse myself mad, blank and barren as the farmer’s fields. Our neighbours waste miserably. I want to touch something that bleeds. |
|
About the Author: Natalie Crick (UK) has poetry published in Bare Fiction, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Moth, Rust and Moth, The Chiron Review, Red Wedge Magazine, The Adirondack Review and elsewhere. She is studying for an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University and is currently taught by Tara Bergin and Jacob Polley. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice.