Another Story

after Catherine Smith

 

By Julie Mellor (UK)

 

She took a basket and gathered windfalls. Their dead weight

pulled at her shoulders as she lugged them indoors.

She took a bone-handled knife from the kitchen drawer,

the one her father had used to carve the beef.

She sliced the apples clean down the middle, their pips

like tiny wooden lungs.

 

When the children came home there was nothing to eat

except hard cubes of turnip left over from the lantern

she’d made, the lantern now grinning candle light

in the kitchen window, and slices of apple

sour enough to make them squint.

 

She removed their squints with the point of the knife,

threaded them with cotton and strung them above the Aga

where they dried like honesty. When her husband came home

she wound the garland of squints around his neck,

told him she was already late, grabbed the bone-handled knife

and fled into the night.

 

The knife acted like a compass, pointing North.

She followed its lead, walked until the soles of her shoes

wore thin and the wet uppers were soft as cardboard.

Thorns snagged her tights; her white skin shone through the holes

like a scattering of silver coins, or the thumbprints

of her children as they had gripped her wrist.

 

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Another Story won the first prize, African Prisons Project Poetry Competition 2013

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Julie Mellor lives in Penistone, near Sheffield, and teaches English at a local secondary school. After gaining a degree in English at the University of Huddersfield, she went on to do an MA in Writing at Sheffield Hallam, followed by a PhD, which she completed in 2003. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Brittle Star, Mslexia, The Rialto and Smiths Knoll. Her pamphlet, Breathing Through Our Bones, was published by Smith Doorstop in 2012.