apoemhowsweet

I didn’t have the golden hair of those who chose and were chosen to be angels in the school plays. Whilst I waited with sore fingers crossed they knew just like Goldilocks that they could have what they picked. And I with my safety pin, was always picking locks. Back in my mother’s country for the summer holidays, where a glass teacup was always warming the crook of my thumb, I unlocked the padlock on a keepsake box, and held in the hollow of a damp palm an odd memento, glowing, as if haloed. It was the golden tooth of my great-aunt Fatima, who once wrote with a licked-pen a healing prayer on the swollen melon-size glands of m

There’s something poignant about the way that first whiff of spring in England makes us feel. For me it’s like taking the first sip of strong coffee in the morning; it seems to crackle in my brain cells. It’s fizzy lemon slipping down the throat when dehydrated. We drink the first bit of that spring feeling in. We hadn’t even known we were thirsty. Before I know it the feeling has passed and I want more, as though searching with a straw at the bottom of a glass tumbler. I have had my taste of what is to come, and now that I have realised my thirst I feel it more keenly that ever. Maybe wine is a more accurate image, a

My therapists have always been obsessed with the fact that I was an only child for ten years. They’re certain that’s what messed me up, being the centre of my parents’ world for so long and then suddenly, having to share their attention with another. Professionals always pounce on that explanation, eyes shining, without listening to whether it sits right with me. They say ''You starved yourself half to death to regain your parents’ attention from your younger brother,'' and ''you shrank to be smaller, and therefore cared for in the same way as him.'' They are interesting interpretations, and maybe there is a grain of t

I need to be loved today. and nobody feels like clapping just for the fact that I am alive. I want banners, welcome back cupcakes, and cheering so loud that I forget his overlapping tooth, and the numbers on the backs of cereal boxes. It feels silly, really, but the hill we used to sit on was beautiful, not just because we were together but for the distant streetlights that were like sequins stitched to a black velvet sky. And I could look outwards back then, at a pattern of events, instead of in, like I do now, at my greying insides. You wouldn’t leave a pimple half squeezed, and yes it hurt, so much, but maybe, just maybe, it didn&#

She wore yellow dungarees, the colour of irony and they clashed with her eyelashes, spiky with tears. She had onion-skin hair, and a limp ponytail that hung from the top of her head like a rope. But to us she was loud metal, clanging above our heads as we crouched under the climbing frame. She was the reason our stuffed animals felt softer than ever, our milk sickly sweet with potential loss, and our necks suddenly so bare. We saw a lollipop scowl and a tongue that stuck out, A threatening mustard kid, dusty knees like in the movies, and we indulged in our raised heartrates, cradled and stroked and whispered to our toys; our insides felt so

It is okay to be getting your hair trimmed for the first time in eighteen months. It is fine to let yourself inflate a sad story and then another, like pink gum bubbles In the direction of anyone who will listen. You can now chew over the last year and a half of your life from a distance, when you’re at the hairdressers, after she notices the short patches by your sideburns with an inquisitive look. You can hold back the tears with relative ease, as if telling of someone else’s illness, rolling the grief around in your mouth like a gobstopper whist her acrylic nails gently graze the backs of your ears. You can use an entire palm

The pupils of our teacher's eyes bored into my soul, the day she handed out Auden's poem. It was that poem most people know; 'Stop all the clocks'. Miss Holloway, her name was, and she asked the class what we thought of it. How the poem made us feel. It was those eyes again, when she spoke. They searched our faces like the rough hands of a blind-man. I wanted them to catch mine across the room. I craved a deep connection so much, one like Matilda and Miss Honey. My hands scrambled at the paper, still warm from the printer. I could barely read the words through my hunger for meaning, my elevated heart-rate. But when I had finished, Auden's st

I dream of us, and the dream hurts with an almost-pain, one that can barely be recalled. It’s like blindly running a fingertip over a forearm dappled with bruises, and hitting a sharp spot here and there. The dream is a red and smoky room. It’s the smell of wet suede and lipstick over toothpaste. Girls dance slowly as though their limbs are drifting in thick syrup, and we watch them but only see each other. There is a mirror behind our heads, and icy drinking glasses on the table in front with whole glacé cherries on the stems. Candied maraschino. We pluck them free with our puckered lips and the fruits burst full of liquor,