share


My Mother’s Hands

shed coral scales

& sunrise. In England, the inside

 

is ashen. She touches tangerine flowers,

when a woman

 

exiting her home in Camberwell cries,

go back to where you come from, as if

 

she carries still the scent

of dragon-fruit. I swallow

 

cherry stones. I flower

your abandoned garden

 

in my belly, to carry in me the whispers

of all your lost colours. I dream

 

in shades of lilac. Sometimes

my tummy hurts.


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

grew up between Oxford and Mexico City, with stints spent in France and Italy, and began writing poetry while living in Boston, Massachusetts. Her poems have been published in British, American and Canadian journals, including Blackbox Manifold, Colorado Review, The Missouri Review and Willow Springs, and are recently anthologised in Un Nuevo Sol: British Latinx Writers (flipped eye, 2019). 



READ NEXT

poetry

November 2013

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

George Szirtes

poetry

November 2013

And so they shone, every one of them, each crazy, everyone a diamond shining the way things shine, each...

feature

September 2015

Immigrant Freedoms

Benjamin Markovits

feature

September 2015

My grandmother, known to us all as Mutti, caught one of the last trains out of Gotenhafen before the...

Interview

October 2014

Interview with Otobong Nkanga

Louisa Elderton

Interview

October 2014

Some things are meant to be lost. You can’t collect emotions. As the artist Otobong Nkanga tells me this,...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required