Muscle Memory
Three weeks earlier I’d said My dad has Alzheimer’s
to the sashed woman in the porch who swept me
past the kiosk through the transept to the vestry.
The first time I’d said it aloud: I sounded older,
as if I knew just what you needed and how to find it.
She offered me up to the vergers – This lady is enquiring
about Christmas Eve. Her father has Alzheimer’s –
who tumbled over themselves to prove how welcome you’d be,
dementia and all, while I stood like a lost child in a shop.
So, at the end of the year of lost things, we came here,
to sit by the copper font that stretched our faces like toffee,
where giant candelabra breathed wax down the nave,
and the cathedral cat slipped between bags and feet to loll
on a warm grate. And where, when the organ rumbled
the chords of Hark the Herald, you pushed yourself up
from the chair to stand straight-backed, singing the bass line
by heart while the great west door swung open.
Alison Binney is an English teacher and poet from Cambridge. Her debut pamphlet, Other Women’s Kitchens, won the Mslexia Pamphlet Competition and was published by Seren Books in 2021.
And then that first Christmas
December was a race to tick off the dark, draw curtains
at four, weigh the bother of needles against the cheer
of small lights reflecting off spectacles and fancy flutes
making a facsimile of joy. The story we keep going
teeters in the fug of many breaths in an overheated room,
febrile with possible distress, saved by homely protocols
which lead us to tables pushed together and dressed,
cracker jokes, the pudding’s song. Everyone wants
to be laughing, happy for each other and themselves.
We explain our careful choices of presents or despair
in vouchers when imagination failed under the weight
of absence – no-one contesting the way to ignite brandy,
the acceptable time to start drinking, no-one to brace the day
against sinking under so much good stuff, no-one to excuse,
let go early, while it’s still in full swing, upstairs to sleep it off.
Kathy Pimlott’s collection, the small manoeuvres, was published by Verve Poetry Press (2022). She has two pamphlets with the Emma Press, Elastic Glue , (2019) and Goose Fair Night (2016). Her poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies. www.kathypimlott.co.uk
Month’s Mind
For Josie O’Brien 1926 – 2022
Damp January pews,
the air still holding Christmas,
pine and cinnamon.
I remember your terraced house on Christmas Eve,
the bump and curve of wallpaper layered with paint,
the dim certainty of round dolly light switches
slowly fading up from gloom to bright,
scent of pine,
real tree weighed down with lights:
if one went, they all flashed off
the chain unbroken
Elaine Westnott-O’Brien is a writer and teacher. She has been widely published in publications as varied as The New York Times and The Last Stanza Poetry Journal. She lives in by the sea in Ireland with her wife and children. Find her on Instagram @elainewob_words.