Belly Button – Belinda Rimmer

 

On days so dark

I think only of eclipses

my fingers ache from probing

as I try to find a fragment

of my mother

inside my belly button.

 

One small discovery

and we could be reconciled.

Hours with only fluff

and other debris to show.

My belly feels sore, tight.

 

Nothing prepares me

for a seahorse,

a bloody seahorse,

stuck part way out,

tail hooked.

I ease it onto my chest.

 

In a bowl of salty water

it bobs about, happily.

 

What is it trying to tell me?

 

To forget the whole nurturing business,

focus on making your own way

or get what you need from books,

there are plenty of good mothers (and fathers)

lurking within the pages.

 

Note: Male seahorses give birth; neither parent care for their young.

 

 

Belinda has had a varied career: psychiatric nurse, counsellor, lecturer and creative arts practitioner. Her poems have appeared in magazines, for example, Brittle Star, Dream Catcher, ARTEMISpoetry and Obsessed with Pipework. She has poems on-line and in anthologies. She won the Poetry in Motion Competition to turn her poem into a film and read at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. You can find her at belindarimmer.com.

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July 6, 2018 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: ache, Belinda Rimmer, body, books, chest, creative, creativity, darkness, discovery, family, fragment, mother, nurturing, pages, parents, poem, Poetry, salty, seahorse, search, tail, water, writing Leave a comment

Occurrences – Kitty Coles

 

I think you are returning, cell by cell.

At night, sometimes, I note the air arrange

itself the way it would when you entered

a room, the floor boards stirring at

your unseen tread, the house exhaling.

 

Dark thickens and I sense you winding,

winding, its fibres tight, making a rope

to reach me, stretching yourself across

its molecules, to gift me with a breath,

a dream, a shadow of your shape.

 

You’re learning tricks for bridging time

and distance. You heat me with your eyes

when mine are closed though, when the lids fly up,

there’s nothing of you except a footprint

hollowing the carpet, some disarray

 

among the bed covers. This morning,

I opened a book and found a hair

between the pages, dark like yours, and my

heart wrenched itself free and moved around my body,

the way that only you can make it move.

 

My limbs are marked with violet-coloured bruises

like little blossoms the size of fingertips.

You send me messages in newspapers

and in the way leaves fall, the calls of birds.

My spit is thickened with the taste of you.

 

 

Kitty is one of the two winners of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2016 and her debut pamphlet, Seal Wife, was published in September 2017.

October 9, 2017 by foxglovejournal Categories: PoetryTags: air, body, breath, cells, creative, creativity, dark, dream, gift, heart, house, humanity, Kitty Coles, messages, nature, pages, poem, Poetry, room, senses, shadow, tricks, writing Leave a comment