Jigsaw

It starts in utero, painted wood carvings thick as a
finger, gift
wrapped in nostalgia. Colour weaves in time, a voice
with a
thousand faces. Some velcro themselves, urchins of
experience.
Some are stolen. Onlookers swapping their gray clouds
for your
sequinned linings. Habit seeks connection The way
red cars
appear everywhere. Paper craft punches squeezed
into a rat
shaped hole. Then, one day, you sit in a room, blood
staining
the clinical white, listening to a doctor tell you, again,
there is
no heartbeat. And after the third – because starts middles
and ends
must always come in threes – a tidal flow washes away
the picture
along with the list of names collected in notebooks and
stayed chimes
ring from my pores
like sopranos

Mary McQueen is a London born mixed heritage writer. In 2023 she released a spoken word album titled, Mightier than the Sword. In 2024 she was accepted onto the Out-Spoken academy.  Mary is a psychotherapist, founded poetry platform Poetics and hosts a radio show  @kilhapoetry