Marie Studer is a past winner of the Trocáire Poetry Ireland Competition, twice a winner in the Bangor Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge and shortlisted in the Northwest Words Poetry Competition. She has been widely published in literary journals, anthologies, online and most recently in The Ogham Stone, Live Encounters, The Stony Thursday Book, The Storms, The Waxed Lemon, Drawn to the Light Press and Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis. Her first collection, Real Words to be published by Revival Press, in 2023.
Perspective
Perched on a chair, I saw him hoisting coal
from a trailer, one hand clutching the top
of a burlap sack, the other, by his side,
palms as big as men’s dinner plates.
Mam scrubbing pots at the sink, said
that man is fit to support the Eiffel Tower,
I saw a giant with a craquelure face,
a jigsaw in shades of brown, grey and black.
Curls escaped his greasy flat cap –
A tangle, I imagined with nests of
black eggs, a job for the smelly stuff
and a fine comb as wide as a rake.
Boots like boulders hid toes.
I pictured claws and ducked when he waved,
lest, I was made to engage, inhale the stink
like the whiff from the hen house.
Our family met his on the beach in Clonea.
Stripped to his togs, Jim had pinky-white skin,
children digging with buckets and spades
heaped mounds of gold sand on his legs,
his toes on parade, shiny as the mother of pearl,
neat as a freshly clipped box hedge.
His brown eyes, soft and rich as the toffees
he offered from a brown paper bag.
Runt of the Litter
In a crossover apron, Mother commands,
soaking her fingers in a bowl of blood warm glucose-water,
shhh… shhh … shhh … she softly streams,
as if dabbing a scratched knee with TCP;
it labours a cough squeal though –
its eyes stay slit shut.
We fill a cardboard box with straws,
turn our makeshift crib this way and that,
older brother settling it oven side of the range.
Next morning, scatterings of straw speckle
the linoleum to the back door.
We talk about our pink loss to the school.
Our Father
On their return from the hospital
Mam turned off the TV,
ignored mutters of nearly over,
sent us to knees
to drone Holy Mary refrains
as she flattened her fingertips
on bead after bead of mock crystal,
eyes raised to the open palms
of a sacred heart strung above
a bulb of blood light.
One brother picked a blister
of blue paint off his chair,
the other elbowed his prop
in sync with the whirring
tick-tock on the mantel.
Dad mopped his eyes with
a white hanky. That first time,
I saw Our Father cry,
I shrank to the privacy
of a hard kitchen seat,
prayed for my brother
in the ICU.
Anonymous Letter
I wrote a letter hoping for words like those
from a kindly aunt. Fingernails chewed to
the quick, full stops pierced the copybook
page, fault lines smudged with tears,
I had forgotten the prayer:
immaculate conception keeps me pure
in body, pure in the soul – amulet of
blue gold virgin crown presented with
a pack of double-looped Southall’s pads when
I first bled. She was more than one minute
reads, she was a bible of biological advice
tucked between TV and garden guides.
I hid the letter behind the brown paper
cover of Longman’s Latin Grammar.
Not so my thoughts of the girl, the strap
they called her, who got in trouble.
The letter, I did not post. It burnt in flames
of red to white ash, my fingers luxuriating
in metallic blood.
Reciprocal Blessing
This first time, his daughter bathes his feet,
she guides one foot after the other into a bowl
of warm foaming water, lathers with a soft flannel
shins to toes trickling snippets of family news.
He nods a smile, eyes intent on the pane –
apple trees, planted as a young man,
a few filigree leaves clinging to lichen stems.
Her fingertips of silk, circle lotion
on mottles of maroon, times runes.
His hands drop blessings on her scapulae
and, with reciprocal grace, she eases his feet
into double-soled socks.
The Galway Review 