Family Album



On the scan you are tiny – a whiteness

in a dark sky. Your breath steams in patches,

ghost white strokes on the photograph.


(I want to step into the picture to see what happens.

I want to go between the blackness and the clouds).



You stitched yourself to me with fisherman's nylon,

sharp needles where your nails should have been.

But even in my warm belly you were unformed.

When your breath left, your eyes were still closed.

You would not have seen a thing.
I turn the page -
 nobody moved, nobody smiled.



(I want to pull the dark over me and find you there:

you at two, at five, at twelve).



My tongue wraps itself around you, grows limp

when I speak your name. There is urgency in my loss.

I want to unwrap it, to see it, to release it.



My body yearns for you at night. It cries.

At the end of the darkness is the thread of my child.

I carry the weight of the dead.


(I want to place my hands around your face,

my fingers stretching as you smile. My child).




*Abegail Morley’s collection How to Pour Madness into a Teacup was shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection. She is guest poetry editor at The New Writer, her work appears in anthologies and journals including the Financial Times and The Spectator.  She blogs here