Christmas Lights
after Anne Sexton
Santa
is turning on the Christmas
lights
I am waiting
for my diagnosis
crowds have gathered
on the memorial green
for the white
explosion of light
with a ho-ho-ho baritone
Santa
thumps down the switch
God
I will try to be good
please don’t send death
in his fat red suit
Gareth Writer Davies was Shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2014 and 2017) and the Erbacce Prize (2014) Commended in the Prole Laureate Competition (2015) and Prole Laureate for 2017. Commended in the Welsh Poetry Competition (2015) and Highly Commended in 2017. His pamphlet Bodies, was published in 2015 by Indigo Dreams and the pamphlet Cry Baby came out in November, 2017.
Mrs Winter Comes Home
A whisker above zero, she appears
on Slaughter Lane. Glass-winged
in the glow of fairy lights, she falls to Earth
as a dark, silk slip of a thing, drifting in,
soft as baby breath. Poor lamb.
Her body pools on the floor
outside the Christmas Factory door
where she hardens into the dark mirror
we daren’t look into. At sunrise,
I watch her come alive. Bright eyed,
she sharpens her icicles into knives, polishes her hooks.
Some folk try to chase her away.
They glove up, crack their knuckles
and salt the lane, and counting the days,
they shudder at the thought of her star-flecked
footprints on the factory path,
a sackful of feathers left on the step.
The factory steams day and night, spewing
warm light from its windows and tinsel
from its chimneys, but still she slips in
through the systems – a constant lowing that moves
through the pipework, refusing to be bled out.
Poor cow. She hasn’t got a clue who she’s dealing with.
As glitter fills the air like blossom,
her fingers tighten their grip on me. I creep down
to the cellar and open my chest for her.
Come now, blue wisp. Feel free. Fold yourself
into my cold storage, sleep
with the dead meat until it all blows over.
Joanne Key lives in Cheshire. Her work has been published online and in print and won prizes in competitions including the National Poetry Competition, Charles Causley, Prole and Bare Fiction.)
Nativity
All the little humans were graded by size and behaviour
in the small assembly hall decked out
as the Large Hadron Collider.
Walls were plastered with tin foil and draped
with copper tinsel. Accurate? Who knows,
but Mrs Boyle hadn’t had so much fun in years.
Today we’ll be hearing about the detection
of the Higgs Boson said the headmistress. The God Particle
was Martin’s cue to begin: And it came to pass
that the parents were trying hard to follow the story,
but it was so long since any of them had studied
particle physics that they couldn’t remember exactly
who had annihilated who, which gifts the protons
provided and what flavours the quarks were.
It colder in the collider than outer space,
but this, sang Year 6, is how it all began.
Each kid waved a magnet in the air
(the parents joined in with their smartphones)
and the consequence of a billion collisions
were repeated as Gospel. Even Gospel has different versions.
So when Lindsay came on as antimatter
in a tea towel he was booed like a pantomime villain
though no-one could remember if this was appropriate
and the Supercomputers continued on glockenspiel
until the announcement that Higgs boson was found.
By the time the He had been wrapped
in swaddling clothes and placed in a manger
He had already disintegrated. (Applause.)
With a lifetime of 1.56×10-22 seconds
we keep faith the data proves He really exists.
Gillian Mellor wrote this poem because it was fun. And because it was about the kind of nativity she never knew she’d always wanted to be in.