Fingers

Look: aren’t we rainbows
all by ourselves? We reach,
hold, fumble, fret
for the whole family of us. Begging
to be each other’s multiple
multiple twin. No one rises to be the one
who strikes the sweetest note,
pulls the crucial trigger, flips bigger switches –
not the two clever ones that thread the needle;
not the four that stroke skin as if
trusted ambassadors of a whole person.
Together, we are a village,
in this prayerful huddle, this knotted
happiness of children, slim bodies
barely owned.

Ghostly

Last night you locked me out
till in the morning I remembered
your laboured dying, the children
moving, years ago. Why can’t I
dream of kangaroos, wild swimming,
exams that make you sweat all over again?
Instead I gawp at a mock-up of past windows.
See you busy in the kitchen, ignoring me
as I stand keyless and waving,
invisibly, stalking my own life
in inexplicable faux detail.
This is fake news, fake history, resentment
or guilt edited in, or out, I think, glad,
as I wake, relieved to find
that it’s you who’s the ghost.
Troubled all the same.

Puddled

What to do with the gone stagnant and sodden?
The nettled half-reflections of a future snipped at,

half-drenched hopes underfoot, dithering there. Standing,
more mud-clung standing.

How to unclasp the halt of the eyes, sucked down
as they are into a mire

of back-step, un-progress, doubt?
The full-stop stop that’s come here-now and

bent-back bears all of time’s collected excess
of truly unwelcome news.

Just there, a glum forest shortcut balloons into view.
Just there, a heath thrums with space not wanted.

A host of un-walked-off, wasted, opportunities
finally knock off, day’s end a splinter

of tidied unresolve – leave so much singleness:
pain enough to brave the thistles. Walk, just walk.

Ear at the Door

Your kindly shadow there
bending itself into my slow stumble, my mad
half-improvise: re- and rehearsed and now
only splinter-remembered words.

Words eaten straight from my lips by another,
and the silly stand-by glass of water
all I have to keep refilling
the empty shell of me.

Seed

Your expectant face, as if the thousandth
question – why? – might yield
a whole booklength of a sentence, a shout-out
thunderclap of understanding, a gush of a dazzle
of a sprung surprise of a fact.
Facts: you collect them like the pink twists of shells
on a beach only you know the way to,
satnav secrets behind your famished eyes: why?
And my role is to once-upon-a-time an answer that will
fill, like buttered pasta for the grasping mind.
Like worm words for the gaping beak
of the youngest ever scholar;
zoo-time buckets of silvery learning to throw, splash
of a show. Honey drip-dripped
on this small sponge that insists that sponges are much
more (four and A Half!) than they seem…so
just give me another
moment. A moment.
Because.

An Education

Life lived at an angle, vision
tilted. Great hammerheads of hurt and mind-
empty stabs of blinding, spark-extinguished feelings

among the duller, knotted
debris of bereavement: all flow
impeded. The thing, the flow, the life, that used to

happen, simply, never fingered long,
now thuds. Pincers.
Ratchets.

Your flesh-lost image stumbling at my side.

Angela Arnold’s poems have been published in various print magazines as well as online, in the UK and elsewhere. They have also been included in anthologies produced by Templar, Frogmore Press, Eyewear, and others. Her collection In|Between is coming out in 2023 (Stairwell Books). She is also an artist and a creative gardener who lives in North Wales. She enjoys her synaesthesia and languages and is currently learning Welsh. @AngelaArnold777