Charis Anderson
Article
View as PDF: Charis Anderson - Poetry
Email: charis85@hotmail.co.uk
For a Mother
The fallout spelt re-birth
Air thin with bomb scent
And laughing gas
We lay limp and knife-eyed
Beside one another
Grey-lipped and collecting dust
The nurses swamped us
With fact and curled handwriting
Joined-up
Just as we were
For nineteen years
Nobody else could touch us
Mother was a ghost
She kissed my infant neck
As if I were broken glass
Her smile smelled of spilled milk
I wanted to love her
Guilt at being two
When one would suffice
Mother I am sorry
I am a slice of you
And you will never be whole
The Empress's New Clothes
I wasn’t born, I was knitted - an experiment in making the perfect daughter. The yarn
was soft as dusk, trickling through the fingers of my father, looped and threaded,
moulded by my mother in colours that do not exist.
I was a skinny child, my legs - two lengths of string with knots for knees - but I was a
keen athlete, regardless. Each dance would unravel me; each swim would shrink my
loose stitching. I was always finding new ways to lose myself, or to become 'at home'
with me.
On each birthday my mother would knit me a new jumper, dress or mittens and I
would grow, my woollen limbs branching out, becoming intricate and full. I could
never shed any gifts of clothing. Each year they firmly rooted their cuffs and hems to
my frame.
When my father lay dying the bloody colours of my fibres burned bright, clashing so
feverishly that his fading yellowed eyes could still pick me out of the vigil crowd. As
time passed there was plenty of opportunity to trade beauty for brokenness.
I am beginning to notice that my mother is shrinking. It strikes me that she is an image
of my grandmother's ghost, as if she is somehow following her own mother to the
grave. I see the future; my mother still grips her needles and they unwind me,
threadbare, to
the end.
The Corner of the Monologue
I enter a church which once knew my growth.
My head repeats hymn after hymn - my personal battleships.
It is fear that ties me to the pew by fish-netted legs,
my elastic strings, cast out into deep blues.
The weight of the crisp morning beats down on each wet eye.
The congregation whisper their goodbyes, in glances,
holding death and binding it to life,
binding it to yesterday.
I remember our walks down at the wind-firmed fossil beach,
through heavy doors I can still smell the paint on his fingertips
and feel the grit of parched sand between my toes.
I hope only that my speech will take me there.
Our priest appears in fish-eyed clarity, encircled by salt-stained lids.
The walls heave and a thousand mourners cannot breathe.
In this outer-space, November and I remove our colours -
these colours were for him.
