Eve Makis, "Where the Earth Holds Secrets"

Born in Nottingham, Eve Makis worked as a journalist before turning to fiction. She is the author of five novels published by Transworld and Sandstone Press, including The Spice Box Letters, shortlisted for the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the East Midlands Book Award. She co-wrote the award-winning film Boy on the Bridge and co-authored the life writing guide The Accidental Memoir (HarperCollins). Eve is a fiction tutor on the MA Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. She is co-creator of the life writing website the Minute Memoir. Her latest novel, Where the Earth Holds Secrets, is published by Claret Press. 

 

About Where the Earth Holds Secrets, by Eve Makis
Set on the divided island of Cyprus, Where the Earth Holds Secrets follows Nuray, a risk-taking journalist known for uncovering the hidden graves of the missing. When she reaches out to Haris with new information about his father’s disappearance, she pulls him into a past Haris has long tried to avoid.

The case is blown open with the arrival of Elena Clayton, an English forensic archaeologist seeking a fresh start, whose work begins to uncover secrets buried deep beneath the island’s soil. As Nuray, Haris, and Elena are drawn together, they must navigate suspicion, betrayal, and their own tangled histories.

Inspired by the writer’s own family history and the work of inspirational journalist Sevgul Uludag, the book reflects on Cyprus’s unresolved past, tracing a path through loss and remembrance toward the possibility of healing.

You can read more about Where the Earth Holds Secrets on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening of the novel. 

From Where the Earth Holds Secrets

Chapter 1

Cyprus 2016

Nuray had promised herself: No More Investigations. 

But the case of the missing man had found its way into her life one sunlit afternoon in Yusef’s coffee shop as she lingered over a square of walnut baklava. An old man had leaned in close, his breath warm at her ear. ‘Nuray Hasan,’ he’d whispered. ‘I have something for you. The name of a witness. An address.’ 

And just like that, she was back on the hunt. 

The sun scorched the battered bonnet of her Fiat Punto as she drove along the Karpas Peninsula, an elongated finger of land that gave the island its distinctive shape. The road cut through parched fields where white-bellied donkeys roamed like Holy cattle. Cicadas droned in the stillness, like the murmur of missing souls. 

The man she was searching for was a cold case. Like so many others who had disappeared during the island’s troubled years, in the fifties and sixties, in 1974 when Cyprus was invaded. Soldiers, civilians, woman and children, newborns too. She’d heard stories of people being dragged from their homes at night, marched off buses, even snatched from hospital beds. Their names were spoken at family gatherings, at official committees, in dark corners and with nighttime prayers.

The Cypriot dust streamed through the open window, clinging to her skin like cheap glitter. It was everywhere – on her clothes, in her hair, under her eyelids, scratching her eyes. A fig tree loomed ahead, pale and weathered, its trunk whitewashed to protect it from the heat. Turn right at the white-washed fig, the old man had written on a napkin in Yusef’s café. In all her years of searching, trees had helped to signpost the way. Cypress, acacia, carobs and wild olives guiding her through remote stretches where farmers still ploughed with cart and horse. 

She had begun her career in journalism writing about fetes and festivals, petty thefts and the slow rhythm of local news. Then she had started investigating the disappearances. No one called them murder victims. At least, not at that point. 

Her research had led her to yellowing archives, old photographs, to grieving mothers and unmarked graves. Her curiosity about the missing had turned into a burden, yes, but a mission too, a passion that gave her life meaning. It was one thing to write about tragedy from a distance; quite another to connect with the victims, to play a role in solving age-old mysteries. 

Paul Taylor-McCartney, "Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall's Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity"

Congratulations to Paul Taylor-McCartney, UoL PhD Creative Writing graduate, on the publication of his debut non-fiction book, Cornwall Uncharted!

Dr Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, researcher and lecturer whose interests include queer studies, speculative fiction and teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in a wide range of print and electronic media. Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall’s Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity, published by The History Press, is his first non-fiction title. You can read more about Cornwall Uncharted below and on the publisher's website here.

About Cornwall Uncharted: Writing Queer Lives Back into the Landscape

By Paul Taylor-McCartney

Cornwall Uncharted began with a walk. I was looking across the water towards Godrevy Lighthouse, thinking about Virginia Woolf and the childhood holidays in St Ives that would later help shape her seminal novel To the Lighthouse (1927). That small connection between a physical place, memory and writing prompted a much larger question: what other queer histories might be held in Cornwall’s landscapes, if we knew how – and where – to look? That question eventually became a journey across the county. The book moves through towns, artistic colonies and coastal retreats, lighthouses and castles, rural hinterlands, private houses, prisons and contemporary Pride routes. Along the way, it encounters writers and artists, performers and campaigners, soldiers and people whose lives survive only fleetingly in institutional records. At its heart are three interconnected themes – concealment, culture and creativity – and the ways in which they have been shaped by Cornwall itself.

One of the challenges of writing queer history is that the archive rarely gives you everything you want. For much of the period covered by Cornwall Uncharted, openness about same-sex desire or gender nonconformity could carry profound personal, social and legal consequences. Letters might be coded. Newspapers relied on euphemism. Court and prison records could reduce complicated human lives to an offence, a sentence and a date. Silence, therefore, becomes part of the evidence. While researching the book, I became interested not simply in what the archive said, but in what might exist around its edges: the gaps between official words, the routes people took, the houses they chose, the rooms in which they met and the landscapes that allowed them to appear or disappear. This is why place became so important to the project. Cornwall is not simply a picturesque backdrop to these histories. Its coves, moors, lanes, harbours, towns and buildings actively shape them. A secluded house can provide refuge. A winding lane can offer privacy. A coastal community can give someone enough distance from the expectations of elsewhere to experiment with how they live, work or love. But the same landscape can also be watched, mapped and policed. That tension runs throughout the book. In Chapter Five, for example, I place the Cornwall of Daphne du Maurier – its creeks, lanes, boathouses, hidden approaches and private houses – alongside the records of Bodmin Gaol. The comparison produced what I came to think of as a kind of double geography: in fiction, a lane or rented room might provide secrecy and refuge; in official records, those same kinds of spaces could become evidence, a "scene" or a "place of offence." Nowhere did the relationship between landscape, concealment and punishment feel sharper to me than at Bodmin Gaol. In this chapter I examine cases including those of Sergeant Ernest Oke and Private William Davey, whose lives entered the historical record through prosecution and punishment. Their story sits alongside du Maurier’s very different experience of secrecy, privacy and controlled visibility. The intention was not to suggest equivalence between those lives, but to ask what different kinds of concealment cost – and what happens when concealment succeeds or fails.

Throughout Cornwall Uncharted, I include short sections called "A Traveller’s Reflections." These were an opportunity to return to the places themselves. I wanted to acknowledge that researching history can also be a physical and emotional experience: walking the same streets, standing beside a harbour, climbing a castle staircase, entering a prison cell or simply feeling the weather change around a landscape you have spent months encountering through documents. At Bodmin Gaol, the historical material suddenly acquired weight. The names in court calendars were no longer simply entries on a page. The building made questions of confinement, visibility and memory difficult to hold at an academic distance. 

The extract below comes from the Traveller’s Reflection that closes that part of Chapter Five.

From Cornwall Uncharted
Here, I reflected on the case of Oke and Davey and tried to set it at a scale I could hold. Two kits packed in haste. Pay stopped. A letter home, delayed or never sent. A newspaper notice that reduced their actions to a phrase like "improper conduct," and two families left to read between the lines. The prison then fixed these lives in record and stone. It named the offence, measured the time, closed the door on both men.

Yet du Maurier’s life sits alongside this image, offering another kind of confinement: one in which she is not locked up, yet her letters and houses show a careful management of movement, disclosure and risk. Menabilly was then, and is to this day, kept closed to visitors and screened from prying eyes. Desire was routed through correspondence, via friendships that must be framed as safe, through journeys that began and ended elsewhere.

During our visit to the gaol, the site choreographed attention differently. Entry to "The Dark Walk" was timed, then we were released into the museum. The past was not softened so much as held at a distance that allowed looking without breaking. For du Maurier, distance likely worked in a similar way. It became a tool for survival, a way to live with what cannot be named openly.

On our way out, I glanced up at the hotel wing: new glass inside old stone, warm light behind a wall once built to contain and punish. Luxury suites where cells had once stood. Soft furnishings where bodies were counted and kept. The conversion was clever, even aesthetically pleasing, but it left a slightly bitter aftertaste. To be clear: I’m glad people come to visit and take the tour – school groups, couples, families and individuals – who wish to engage with local history, even where opulence blurs the edges between past and present. But if there was a promise worth keeping there, it was this: tell the hard parts in daylight, keep the iron in view and do all in my power not to let the triple-glazed frontages ever erase the voices of the past.

Derek Healy, "Children in the Window"

 

Derek Healy grew up at the foot of the Cotswolds Hills in Gloucestershire and, before a career in mental health social work, studied English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford University. However, overcoming that impediment, he has gone on to see his poetry appear in many journals, including The Road Not Taken, The Lyric, Ibbetson Street (all USA), Orbis, Snakeskin and The Cannon’s Mouth. His fourth collection of poems, Children in the Window (Graffiti Books), was published very recently (January 2026).  It follows Made Strange by Time (2018), Home (2020) and Uncharted (2022). Now a proud and far-flung member of the Ohio Poetry Association, Derek lives on the Malvern Hills with his wife Candida, where they have no children, no dogs and no cats but make do pretty well with each other and some fine friends. 

About Children in the Window, by Derek Healy

Children in the Window, Derek Healy’s fourth collection (Graffiti Books 2026), ranges far and wide, both in its themes and its styles. Sixteen sonnets are dedicated to his wife. In blank verse and free verse he contemplates the bizarre contradictions of the universe we inhabit. Cinquain stanzas take a tongue-in-cheek look at religion, whilst in 6/5 syllabics he peers into some corners which those closest to us never get to see. There is even a rarely encountered ghazanelle, discussing the fad for lovers’ padlocks weighing down bridges. Poignant, vivid, humorous and meticulously crafted, Children in the Window offers up poems to which a reader can return again and again.

You can read more about Children in the Window on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Children in the Window

Downhill      

At five feet ten he peaked,

but now a full half inch and more

has stooped or crumbled away;

white hair thins around a tonsure,

hands sprout spots like mould,

ears need turning towards every voice,

whilst three pairs of spectacles

mete out his sight

and names jump ship in the dark.

Yet these are the best of times:

up with the early sun

when the world lies silent,

free to fashion what he will

from words arranged on a page,

to look not out but in,

discern within himself

the glint of age-old truths

waiting his discovery;

steer his own course at last,

long years of labour behind him,

sunset ripening ahead.

The Shirtwaist Factory Fire

          (Manhattan Island, March 1911)

All ways out locked

against petty theft

or early slopings off to lovers' arms,

the girls have panicked from the flames

to this one high window

they could muscle open.

So far below

the cold dead street

lies empty for them,

the pavement thronged

as though the carnival

might be half a block away

and coming.

Names meet mid-air for one last time.

Then – as though in a moment

become mothers to each other –

one by one they take the ledge,

scramble a goodbye or prayer,

and drop, eyes heavenwards,

two hundred feet.

One final girl appears,

dark hair streaming in the wind

and swirls of smoke,

helped to the precipice

by the day's young stand-in foreman.

Briefly they fumble

a never-to-be-bettered kiss,

before he hands her out

to all eternity

as though onto a train

bound out of state,

her eyes not leaving his

until she drops.

As he follows her

his trouser legs bulge

in the upwards rushing air;

flame light, like chandeliers,

spangling his proudly polished shoes.

Colette Paul, "A Complete Success"

 

Colette Paul was born in Glasgow. She is the author of Whoever you Choose to Love (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/ Phoenix) , a collection of stories which were serialized on Radio 4, and shortlisted for The Spirit of Scotland Writer Award. Colette’s work has appeared in several anthologies and magazines, including Mslexia, Edinburgh Review, Stand, and Litro. Colette’s story ‘O Tell me the Truth About Love!’ won the Tom Gallon / Royal Society of Authors Prize, and three of her stories were included in Victoria Hislop’s edited anthology, The Story: 100 Great Short Stories by Women. Her second collection of stories, A Complete Success, is due to be published this Autumn. Colette lives in Cambridge, where she teaches Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. 

About A Complete Success, by Colette Paul

This is a sharply observed collection which finds comedy and sadness in the ordinary lives of ordinary characters—teenage girls, middle-aged divorcees, a man facing his last night alone in hospital. The stories are linked by a sense of lives in transition, with the attendant fear, exhilaration, and sense of loss those moments can bring. Time after time, characters struggle to understand and communicate their feelings, to their loved ones and to themselves. Despite the melancholy theme, the stories are shot through with humour and lightness, a sense of life in all its complicated messiness. 

You can read more about A Complete Success on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening story of the collection. 

From A Complete Success

From 'Rats'

Before my boyfriend leaves for work he says, ‘I saw another rat last night. You better talk to that neighbour today about feeding the birds.’

‘You talk to her,’ I say. 

‘You’re the one who’s lumbering around the house all day,’ he says. ‘I’ve not got a minute to myself from the moment I get into the lab.’

‘Lumbering,’ I say, ‘that’s very nice!’

‘You were still in your dressing gown when I came home last night.’ 

‘Because I didn’t feel well!’ 

He stops fiddling with his bike helmet and says quietly, ‘Why are you crying?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Why do you think I’m crying?’

He lets out a sigh of frustration. ‘It’s really annoying how you answer a question with another question.’ He sits down next to me with a look of defeat. ‘Do you think you might be depressed?’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘is that a question? I thought we weren’t allowed to answer a question with another question.’ 

Since we moved here six months ago, we argue all the time. I blame my boyfriend for bringing me here, where I have no job and no friends. It doesn’t matter that I’d just got made redundant, or that my best friend had moved to Spain, or that I was actually excited to move somewhere new—I still blame him. It’s not fair, I know, but that is one of the downsides of being such a decisive and definite person, like my boyfriend. 

*

I get dressed and put on some makeup and knock on my next-door neighbour’s door. She is a tiny, stooped old woman, with bright eyes like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. From our bedroom window we have witnessed her throwing bird seed around her garden with surprising energy.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I say, ‘but we live next door, and we’ve been getting a lot of rats in our garden. The internet says it might be because you’re feeding the birds—the rats are attracted to anywhere they can find food.’ 

‘Oh dear,’ she says, ‘have you got them as well?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Loads of them. They seem to be coming from your garden.’ 

‘I hear them scurrying around, scratch-scratch-scratch, all hours of the day.’ 

‘In your house?’ I say, horrified. 

‘I don’t know,’ she chuckles. ‘The council’s been round a few times, but they can’t see where they’re coming from either.’

‘Well maybe you could try stopping feeding the birds,’ I say. ‘That’s the biggest way to get rid of them, the internet says.’ 

‘Oh I love my birds,’ she says. ‘I sit and watch them all day. They’re the only thing that keeps me going since my husband died.’ 

Roger Bygott, "Ginsberg & Manchester"

 

Roger Bygott is a writer and researcher living in Manchester. He was an ordained Buddhist for twenty years and lived in a monastery in the Spanish mountains for three years. He studied Interactive Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, which led him to co-found and co-direct Manifest Arts, a biennial arts festival in Manchester that highlighted the city's network of arts studios between 2015 and 2019. His essays have been published in Beat Scene and Dark Mountain.

About Ginsberg & Manchester, by Roger Bygott
Allen Ginsberg visited Manchester twice. He barely figures in the city's history, and Manchester barely figures in his. Yet two brief visits — a summer afternoon in 1973, a Library Theatre reading in 1979 — hold richer stories than the bare facts suggest.

Ginsberg & Manchester brings together several figures whose lives were touched by Ginsberg in different ways: Alan Wise, a charismatic music impresario (manager of Nico, John Cooper Clarke and Donovan) from Salford, whose letters to Ginsberg span fourteen years; Steven Taylor, a guitarist born in Gorton who became Ginsberg's closest musical companion for two decades; Jonathan Williams, the American avant-garde publisher (Jargon Press) who first brought Ginsberg into the city centre; and Jampa Thaye, a Manchester grammar school boy who discovered Buddhism through Kerouac, became an influential Buddhist teacher, and who was Ginsberg's host when he came to the Library Theatre. This is a story about how a great American poet left a faint but enduring mark on an English city that never quite noticed he was there.

The book also features rare and unpublished photos of Ginsberg and his associates.

You can read more about Ginsberg & Manchester on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Ginsberg & Manchester
In one of Allen Ginsberg’s date books, there’s a barely intelligible squiggle across the boxes for 4–6 June 1979. On the sixth day, at the end of the squiggle, is an arrow and the question: ‘Manchester?’ 

What was the story behind that asemic flourish? It had been five years since Ginsberg’s fleeting visit to Manchester in August 1973. There weren’t many reasons for him to return; his connection with the north-west of England was primarily with Liverpool, thanks to his fascination with the Beatles and connection with the Merseybeat poets. 

That arrowhead was inviting enquiry. What was he doing? Who was he travelling with this time? The existing biographies were of little help. Ginsberg could pack his days with meetings, readings, socialising and cultural events, so it’s not surprising that his all-too-brief visits to Manchester get short shrift in his letters and the many biographies of him.

Michael Schumacher, in his biography Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg, notes that in 1979, ‘Allen’s European reading tour included visits to Paris, Cambridge, London, Newcastle, Rotterdam and Rome – all in a whirlwind schedule that lasted less than a month.’  Manchester has got lost in the whirlwind. Barry Miles’s biography of Ginsberg mentions neither his 1973 nor his 1979 visit to Manchester. I started to wonder if the question mark in Ginsberg’s date diary might indicate a possible visit that never materialised. 

Then I discovered a June 1979 letter to his friend and fellow Beat poet Gary Snyder, sent from the Netherlands on 14 June 1979: 

After triumphant tour of the capitals of Europe – Genoa, Milan, Spoleto, Paris, Manchester, Cambridge, London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam – we’re dragging our weary tongues o’er the sea to Newcastle to visit [Basil] Bunting and last reading there … We brought Steven Taylor to guitar and sing and all turned out funny and energetic like a folkie tour. 

Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitarist and musical director, is an integral part of the story. He was born to a working-class family in east Manchester, who emigrated to the USA in 1965 when he was ten years old. 

On 5 June, Taylor joined [Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Anne Waldman] on the 12.55 p.m. train from Euston, heading north for a reading at the Manchester Library Theatre ...

Katherine Howey, "In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens"

 

Katherine Howey lives in Leicester. She has a special interest in the social history of the late Georgian period, and realistic portrayals of neurodiverse and disabled people. Her historical fiction focuses on themes of outsidership and disability, and the struggle to break free of stereotypes to achieve a fulfilling and authentic life. In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens is her debut novel and book one in the Lucinda series. Book two, Reeve’s Emporium, is also out now. She has published academic work in the fields of assistive technology and has a certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She previously taught neurodiverse students in both further and higher education.

About In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, by Katherine Howey

In her debut novel, In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, Katherine Howey weaves a compelling tale of heartbreak, courage and love set against a background of revolutionary politics and social unrest in late eighteenth-century England.

Lucinda arrives in London, bright, pretty, but impoverished. Her efforts to support herself through respectable work as a seamstress are thwarted when she becomes ill with rheumatic fever and is unable to continue in her trade. She encounters the handsome but troubled physician, William, whose path mirrors her own, but her hopes of love collapse at the whims and tyrannies of the upper classes.

In desperation, she goes to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, a notorious meeting ground for all levels of society. Can she find a path out of destitution, and claim her independence?

You can see more information about In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel.

From In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens

Chapter 17

Drowsy in the heat, Lucinda could hear the small waves slapping against the sides of the boat as it made its way upstream to Vauxhall. She had not been to the Pleasure Gardens before, their being considered less salubrious than the Gardens at Ranelagh which she had visited with Richard Meadows just a few years before, her heart full with such soaring hopes, but she knew of them through reputation. The small craft glided through the water. She looked curiously at the riverbank. They had left the looming white mass of the Tower and its sinister, moss grown Watergate entrance far behind them, and she could see the vast edifice of St Paul's jutting on the skyline beyond the mudflats of the shore and she fancied that the grand cathedral held her in its protective gaze.

Her palms were sticky, and she began to feel apprehensive at what could lie ahead. Reluctantly, she turned her thoughts to how she might carry out her intention. She had heard many times of how the courtesans and street-walkers came to the gardens. She wondered if she had the courage to take a step that would take her beyond the pail, and yet how else, no matter how hard she worked, could she save enough money to leave London? At least in Vauxhall, away from her locality on the fringes of Southwark, she could conceal her actions. She dreaded the thought of her landlady, Daphne, and her girls finding her out, and had no wish to become known in Southwark as a streetwalker. At least she could keep her reputation and her respectability as a teacher to the trades people of Southwark who send their children to her to be educated. 

The current was swift and soon the power of the river had carried them swirling through the arches of Westminster Bridge. Alert now from the reviving splash of the water, Lucinda felt the prickle of dread crawl up her spine as she observed the huddled forms lying precariously atop the starlings, surrounded by the lapping waters, drowsing in the filth. Her heart wrenched as they swept by and a woman lent towards them from her perch with outstretched hand clamouring for alms. Her face was swathed against the heat, and Lucinda thought she saw the pale orb of a babe’s head at her shoulder. Uncomfortably, she faced towards Vauxhall, her resolve strengthened.

Claire Walker, "How to Shape Our Mouths"

 

Claire Walker’s poetry has been nominated for the Forward Prizes, and shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her work is published in journals and anthologies including Poetry Wales, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Finished Creatures, Dust, Aesthetica, and Ten Poems about Daughters (Candlestick Press). Her new pamphlet is How to Shape Our Mouths (Black Cat Poetry Press, 2026). Claire is co-editor of Atrium poetry webzine, and is currently studying for a Creative Writing MA at the University of Birmingham.

About How to Shape Our Mouths, by Claire Walker
How to Shape Our Mouths is a consideration of womanhood, exploring experiences of artists, writers, muses, mothers and daughters, often through an ekphrastic lens. 

You can read more about How to Shape Our Mouths on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From How to Shape Our Mouths

In which I am one of Modigliani’s nudes

We share a cigarette at the window, blow smoke out into the evening. This is our 1917 Paris skyline, and you are in full bloom, the exhibition imminent. We’re down to embers, so I remove my robe, the cliched silk slipping easily away. I move to the couch and recline. There is tenderness as you ask if I’m comfortable. Amedeo, here I’m so comfortable I could dream. You lift my head, place another cushion for me to rest on. By now, you have a reputation for drink, though you’re not yet tragic, and I am not yet grieving. The walls of your studio are blush-soft. You take up your brush, mix colours to match my hair, contemplate the correct earthy tone for my skin. My spine uncurls, my neck grows long upon the canvas. Here, we are comrades, the moment both abstract and acute. Let’s take my sadness, your poor health, and let’s make something beautiful. This is not sex, or love. There is a little pigment of my heart that wishes to be seen, and there is your longing for greatness. Come, see you whisper. I notice you have captured the exact shade of my irises, the exact shape of my eyes, not your go-to almond form. You tell me you’ll paint the background warm and red like the soul. Modi, by now, all the good light has gone. We circle back, we share a cigarette, blow smoke out into the Paris night. A night so black we no longer see our breath escaping us.

Unzipped

"It was as if another woman had been waiting inside her all along, ready to slip out" - Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

After I gave birth to my daughter,

I cradled her on the crisp clean sheets.

My body grew a new version of me,

one long exhale, skin unzipped 

and out she slid, quiet and instinctive. 

I knew how to hold the girl, 

was so sure of this fresh employment. 

My baby and I made friends with ourselves 

and those like us. I felt sweet at ease 

teaching how to feed, smile, count on fingers, 

how to shape our mouths into mama.

  

At thirteen, our certainty is delicate 

as sugar work. Those two, who slipped 

knowingly from me, have less to say. 

Still entwined by blood and love,

some days laughter halts in thickened air. 

The bared teeth of that zip pull away, 

come apart. And although we remember 

how to smile, sometimes our mouths cloy 

with stuck apologies. There is a confusion

within us. Those people we once knew —

not quite gone, not quite there either.