“Kitchen, Sinister”

By Laura Potts

 

Ten springs gone in my morning of life, I wore light

in the summer of my voice, in the candles once made

of my eyes. That night dusk swung out and away into noise

wild and white above town, and down in my childhood

garden lost the pond breathed out light grey and soft.

I remember not. But black clot and burnt in my throat

when she coughed up hot liver that night in the gloam,

the globes of her eyes gone bloodfull and long

did the birds scream murder outside. I cried. My

winter-ghost mother gone grey in her day, a tragedy

staring and wearing that cracked pale-fade skin in an old

kitchen light. When food was thin she served me lies. No,

the stars did not giggle the puddles that night

when my dark-fire youth wheeled a wind round the house,

her once-fluted mouth nursing liquor and meth. Her deathlight

was dark as a gobbet of gas, a heart in a jar on a chimney last

lit back when I was a lamb. After that? I took a bath. Black

was the path at infant’s end, a lack-lanterned track derailing

and cracked was the girlhood glow of my light. O mother

of mine, the window-steam bled itself pretty that night.

Under the trees, I sit in the asylum garden.

I swing the bottle to my lips and swig.

 

Laura Potts is twenty-two years old and lives in West Yorkshire, England. Twice-recipient of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her work has appeared in Agenda, Prole and Poetry Salzburg Review. Having worked at The Dylan Thomas Birthplace in Swansea, Laura was last year listed in The Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She also became one of The Poetry Business’ New Poets and a BBC New Voice for 2017. Laura’s first BBC radio drama aired at Christmas, and she received a commendation from The Poetry Society in 2018