A collection of poetry by Annie Clarke

Roots

Your roots are growing in, so you allow

My help. I mix the dye as you undress, 

Preparing bottles, kneeling on a towel

To paint you. When the water drains, I press

My hands against your head. I like it best

When weight is lifted off my scalp – I try

To stand each strand up as I brush, and rest

Them gently down before we let it dry.

The colour has gone everywhere. We wake

To beetroot bedding, stained from where your head

Has touched the pillowcase. Vermilion drips

Have dried across the mirror, where they make

New portraits, canvas freckled – we’ve turned red

From your smudged temples to my fingertips.

Artwork by Annie Clarke

Sestina

It can help you regulate your breathing

when I fold myself around you, squeezing hard, so your ribs

rise and fall with mine. There are dark rings

under your eyes today, damp coffee ground

crescents. But I won’t let things slip – 

this is nothing we can’t handle.

You keep picking fights with the kettle handle – 

say it’s looking at you funny. It jeers, breathing

hot steam into your eyes. Its lip

curls, it jabs you in the ribs.

The kettle spouts playground

taunts, dancing just out of line with the hob’s hot rings.

Each dawn chorus brings your percussive rings

tapping on that handle.

It’s familiar ground,

I know to play conductor, count our breathing

and enclose the quickstep ribs

that catch the light with every quaver of your silk slip.

Still, sometimes I slip

into similar routines. The hammerings

against my ribs

are too much for me to handle,

I join your ragtime, offbeat breathing

until it feels like there’s no coming round.

But we built each other from the ground

up. Creation myth, you made me from mud and slip,

and breathing

life into my mouth, I breathed. We were vitrified through firings,

and now, hard enough to handle,

you can beat against my ribs – 

or I was fashioned from your ribs,

that tangent, like raising man from ground

wasn’t enough. And all

those stories slip

into one another, mirrorings

across the ages, familiar as breathing –

it’s old ground. All tales told before. If tears slip 

out in dribs and drabs or outpourings,

we’ll handle this, I have you, live and breathing.

Artwork by Annie Clarke