Mother of Pearl
It was when your hair fell like snow I found it again. No longer moon blonde, time had coppered the hair auburn. The garage is where your roots grow. I found the plait of hair in a small blue suitcase with silvered clasps, two feet long, each end tied with a thin black ribbon. A relic, my mother keeps the dead parts of herself in the damp dark meant for a car, trophies of past selves.
Eyes blue, inherited from a Polish father who never spoke his native words to her. She spoke it at a boarding school run by nuns who were in the camps. You must speak the language of the dead they told her. But this tongue loosened from her vernacular by the time the hairs of the plait grew. Polish-ness was something my grandfather wanted to smoke out rather than enflame with pride.
Now, when she hears Polish and the sharp plosives of the mouth, my mother will immediately stroke my arm and say, there’s our blood. I chase the heritage, while she folds lace tablecloths around amber brooches sent from a distant homeland beneath her dead hair.
When my grandfather applied for a passport in the 70’s, despite first coming to the UK straight after the second world war in 1946, he was paid a visit. Two men came round for tea and dropped a suitcase full of photographs taken of him unknowingly. You are being watched, is what these two men were telling him. We know what you are, beneath the grey wool suit you picked up from the tailor in Kilburn yesterday. You are from a place unknown.
My grandfather was always taking photographs of statues. My young mother often beside them, usually in graveyards, her long blonde plait roped across her coat.
We were together the first time I saw the hair. It was a whistle pure December eve, burying a framed print of a Bruegel painting she hung on the wall of my grandmother’s hospice room before she died. My mother lifted this thick brassy twine with care from the greying blue case. I remember the delicacy of how she handled it, as if cupping a large opal pearl from an oyster.
She lost all her hair ten years ago with a cancer. It grew back thinner, in tiny white coils that stretched out in the peace of recovery. It was then I sought out her jewel in the garage, stored behind boxes of Christmas decorations and letters stamped with old soviet watermarks. I told her we could maybe make a wig from the plait while the rest grows back. She laughed and asked me if I knew why she even has it still. Why then, I asked.
It was the first time I ever said no. Your grandfather didn’t speak to me for a week afterwards.
If a saint, it would be the object they paint her with. Saint Catherine and her wheel, Saint Lucy and her plucked eyeballs. My mother and her plait of hair, halo engulfed with pearl.
Lucy A Kulwieć is a writer from London, UK. She was offered the only fully funded bursary place on GRANTA magazine’s Memoir Writing Workshop 2024. She has most recently been published with Press 11:11, The EcoTheo Review and Minor [Lits].
Note: Mother of Pearl was previously published on Jardin
Singing Carols On The Dementia Ward
machines rasp, snort, bleep rhythms out
of tune and the air is clogged with thick, thick heat
at this tinsel-festooned jamboree; drug-fuelled,
they scuttle, blunder into chairs curved like a grimace,
gowns sighing from behind, shrug at their names,
nod listlessly at the scattered nurses, ignore time,
but, as we launch O Little Town of Bethlehem,
unblinking, they mouth, they blast every single
syllable and we beam at each other from across the ward,
from across the gulf, from our different continents
Adam Elms is a visually impaired creative from Bristol. His poetry has appeared in over twenty books, magazines, and online journals. He won the 2023 Waltham Forest Poetry Award and was nominated for the 2025 Forward Prize. Instagram: @adamelmspoetry
Some Days Before Christmas
I think it was the day school broke up
that you and Dad went into town,
to get the last of the Christmas shopping.
At first, I hardly noticed you were gone,
counting down the days until my bike
and Wembley football would arrive.
Afternoon slipped into early evening
and you were still out, the thrill
of expectation now replaced by dread.
Always a nervous child, I ran
to the sitting-room window, small head
scrabbling beneath the net curtain, face
veiled in the glass. Each dark figure passing
gave me hope, then disappeared, while
every siren that drained into the darkness,
served to stoke an emptiness I couldn’t describe,
as if Christmas had been put on hold.
When you arrived home, laden-down
with shopping, I never felt such joy,
the trepidation of loss put away for now.
Maurice Devitt is Curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site, his Pushcart-nominated poem,The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015. His second collection Some of These Stories are True was published by Doire in 2023.