Red as a fairytale

Who will pick the apples now she’s gone?
Orchards of eaters, cookers, some red-fleshed
that she’d harvest and lay on racks,

then gather those on the ground, struggle
down with bag-loads to dump on my doorstep.
No note. As if they’d blown here. Windfalls.

Just cut away the bad bits, she’d say
if I rang, and I’d stew them to a pale pulp,
pinkish if any were red to their core.

Red was her colour: flamboyant dresses,
fandango-dancing, castanet-snapping,
painted nails, laughing scarlet lips.

Welcome to the House of Fun says a poster
still hanging in the dark of her hall.

Mary Mulholland’s poems are published most recently in Mslexia, Magma, Aesthetica, The Interpreter’s House, and forthcoming in Stand and Pomegranate London.. She has a pamphlet from Live Canon and another forthcoming from Broken Sleep.  www.marymulholland.co.uk