SWALLOW
Scorn is balled tight in my Liverpudlian mother.
Her suspect eyes mistrust the colour of green tea
leaving me exposed
like I am seven years old with a tide mark on my neck.
Rummaging in a kitchen drawer full of junk
I find a misplaced accent
buried between elocution receipts.
I lick a finger and begin to rub away its stains
before placing it on my buffed tongue
as though it’s the Eucharist,
part of the sacrament of my birthplace.
Knocking it back, the sounds snag my throat
I cough, splutter, hack on the c’s from back teeth
phlegm rising and pushed to the sides
ready to take a heavy breath on the glottal the’s
to choke on the accent of my hometown.
PLANTING FLAGS
Road works provide a backbeat on 72nd Street
taxicabs bob past like yellow hardhats,
shielding the Dakota from iPhone lenses.
No fanfare when I arrived on the Upper West Side,
brass instruments couldn’t outshine
the doorman’s buttons as he trooped from a gothic hut.
Waxy, I pose on the sidewalk, a filmset of death
paying respects to the spot of Lennon’s last breaths;
there’s no blue plaque, nothing to say he lived here.
On pointe, the doorman draws a transatlantic line
like a mirage through clogged air
capped toe drawing ‘you’re not allowed’ to go there.
Paving stones declare a no-go zone
a checkpoint on entrance into a building
giving me no rights to claim what is his alone.
Helen Harrison
Helen Harrison is a poet based in North West England with poems published with; The North, Bare Fiction, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Cake, Flash, Prole Books, Cerasus, Poetry Alone, Obsessed With the Pipework, The Seventh Quarry, Black Nore Review, 52 for 26, Home from Home anthology, poetics with Axon, and creative non-fiction vignettes with Short Magazine. She has been an Artist-in-Residence with Lime Arts, and MFT NHS.