<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Mrs Winter Comes Home<\/strong><\/p>\n A whisker above zero, she appears <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Joanne Key<\/strong> 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.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2017-poetry-picks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15569"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23642,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15569\/revisions\/23642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\non Slaughter Lane. Glass-winged
\nin the glow of fairy lights, she falls to Earth
\nas a dark, silk slip of a thing, drifting in,
\nsoft as baby breath. Poor lamb.
\nHer body pools on the floor
\noutside the Christmas Factory door
\nwhere she hardens into the dark mirror
\nwe daren\u2019t look into. At sunrise,
\nI watch her come alive. Bright eyed,
\nshe sharpens her icicles into knives, polishes her hooks.
\nSome folk try to chase her away.
\nThey glove up, crack their knuckles
\nand salt the lane, and counting the days,
\nthey shudder at the thought of her star-flecked
\nfootprints on the factory path,
\na sackful of feathers left on the step.
\nThe factory steams day and night, spewing
\nwarm isotretinoinonlinebuy.com\/<\/a> light from its windows and tinsel
\nfrom its chimneys, but still she slips in
\nthrough the systems \u2013 a constant lowing that moves
\nthrough the pipework, refusing to be bled out.
\nPoor cow. She hasn\u2019t got a clue who she\u2019s dealing with.
\nAs glitter fills the air like blossom,
\nher fingers tighten their grip on me. I creep down
\nto the cellar and open my chest for her.
\nCome now, blue wisp. Feel free. Fold yourself
\ninto my cold storage, sleep
\nwith the dead meat until it all blows over.<\/p>\n