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the poet
Manchester-based Louise Machen has an MA in Creative Writing from The University of Manchester. Nominated for The Forward Prize (Best Single Poem –Written), she's had work in The Poetry Bus, Acropolis Journal, The Morning Star and Cape Magazine. Louise has been a featured poet at East Ridge Review, and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and twice for Best of the Net. Her work has featured on BBC Radio Manchester, and she was commissioned to write a poem for FC United of Manchester, celebrating their twentieth anniversary. Louise wrote a collaborative pamphlet, The Words of Others Are All We Have, and has published her debut collection, I Am Not Light. She's also a member of the poetry collective behind the audiobook, Which Way the Words Grow.
the poems
In Need of a Closer Shore
After the MV Princess Victoria Memorial, Portpatrick
Granite-bolted above my wind-torn head,
her greenish hands hang from iron history
above a sharp and steely sea –
fingers splayed and clinging
like a mother’s desperation
to recover the awe of infancy.
Flogged by the air, I edge broadside
and the picture becomes whole
where pasts erode like sea stacks
falling in on themselves –
a short crossing, a solitary shift
from which returning will always mark disaster.
Gusts form abrasions like a scolding
from her matriarchal tongue,
whipping this child who is too close to the abyss –
a daughter distracted, peeling feet from algae,
unwilling to let go of her fractured vessel,
as water floods the deck of attrition
sluicing legs of broken timber.
Do not drown me now
in their loneliness.
A Burnt Child
Dreads the Fire
I dare to get out of bed each day,
wash my face in troubled waters,
rough flannel, tender cheeks
– skin aflame from the fingertips
of yesterday’s reluctant ownership.
I keep my breathing shallow,
beneath a square of sodden cotton,
as though this room is smoke-filled
– made safe by makeshift blindfolds
and a thin but bolted door.
I souse the canvas of my flesh,
hot water pooled in porcelain,
the slop and slough echoes
– a rhythmic meditation
made orange in the dawning light.
I recite the rules by rote
by heart, by practise, practise, practise
by trial and by error, so quietly
the hum of my voice is a vaporous elegy
to rebellion: a softly spoken slander.
I have been taught the right way
and my way are not always the same.
I pat the notes of my learning dry
– water drains away. There is breakfast
to be made with clean hands for glass smiles.
Remains
Pulling up floorboards in the back room,
we saw a green checked tea towel tightly wound –
years hoarded in folds of bruised yellow,
incongruous with copper pipes in cavities
and the tedium of Sunday morning DIY.
Fatherly hands unfolded the cloth –
we watched as he brought to light
the fragile skeleton of a tiny bird,
phalanges curled and consenting
to this almost-ceremony of the dining table –
a not-quite final rites for our cotton-bound
hand-me-down.
My eyes widened like the orbital rings
of that small skull, emptying their disbelief
across its featherless frame.
A hollowed relic of care wrapped
as though old bones could fly away.
Turning to my mother, he said,
People are strange, aren’t they?
In the room where, now,
he keeps her ashes.
Publishing credits
In Need of a Closer Shore / A Burnt Child Dreads the Fire:
I Am Not light, (Black Bough Poetry)
Remains: exclusive first publication by iamb