Lilias

My mother was a beauty: a snowstorm in summer,

the whoosh of Marilyn Monroe’s skirts, a lily

squandering her brightness, skin like Grace Kelly,

but a waning moon, T.B., ghost in the mirror,

a blank page others scribbled on, a doubt,

a melting glacier, a porcelain hairline crack

filled with Kintsugi gold, Diazepam, Prozac,

white sugar, white noise, a white-out.

Rigid in death, her mouth was a black hole

I shrank from, her hands claws, her hair

greasy but she was a carapace, harmless, empty.

Whatever it is that is life, her spirit or soul

was now air, immanent, in the atmosphere,

in the silence before dawn, the light on the sea.

Shortlisted for the Wigtown prize, single poem category, 2023

and published in Aesthetica magazine, 2023.