Articles Available Online

At the bottom of the garden, my mother and a woman dressed like Barbara Hepworth argue over a sculpture of my birth,   if the bronze plinth should be horizontal or vertical, the right shade of blue for the umbilical cord   Hepworth adds a curl of hair with a toothbrush, pats down the clay like a pony   My mother sticks her chisel in, disappointed in the arrangement of her legs, if she had her way   the sculpture would include a dancing fountain and hum like a refrigerator, full of roses, a sundial and a coat of arms,   her snacks, soft drinks and wine Instead the sculpture stands in the April shadows of overgrown gorse,   one arm in the air like the chimney of the defunct engine house where my father   worked in the summer of ’85, where copper wires crawled in beneath the sea – no messages   But what about the father? Hepworth asks Oh, he wasn’t involved, my mother says   Hepworth rolls her eyes, the whites of her eyeballs like a cliff face, the grey of her overalls   like a gun She begins to sing: Don’t turn your back on me, baby   Blues like the sulky one in a rainbow Blues like your favourite moon   With so many conflicting opinions, a therapist had warned the sculpture of my birth of this moment   and offered some advice: be lucid Talk to the older generations as if talking to the sea   Keep a list of all their errors, like those lists you’ll keep of all the things you eat while falling in love:   roast beef, feta cheese, champagne bon bons, shish taouk, french fries and wild grass   Keep a list of all the places where you’ll no longer have to be a sculpture or a birth: the backseat of a servees on Rue Sursock,   a minibus across the Asian Minor, the heart-shaped swimming pool of Le Club Militaire   Even Hepworth will not be able to capture the light as it falls over your face on a Red Sea bottomless boat —   the fishes kissing the glass, the moon flirting with the sky, only hinting at its evening plans   My mother interrupts: Aren’t the blues a bit obvious? The woman who once refused a pedicure   on her wedding day – who said if she wanted her toenails in a different colour she’d slam them in