JaneyLFoster

I’m somewhere on the wave of a contraction feeling its energy burst, its necessary need, its primal force. I’m with my mother in law, her tiny form creating another, her small arms cradling, her small mouth saying ‘he has a heavy head.’  And I’m gulping air into my own tiny lungs, fresh into the world, carrying my mother’s chemicals, her genes, her ways,  on and on and on. I’m somewhere not…

The radiator warmed the back of her thighs as the winter afternoon crept towards night. She waited for the tightness to ease out, for her muscles to relax. It had been such a bright day but she needed rain. She wanted that cold, end-of-year rain to bounce off the supermarket car park tarmac, for the lights to fracture and sparkle like they did, for car tail-lights to be the only colour as she…

And the feeling of meconium, pushing through, the filling of my fragile wings until they’re strong. Until they carry me up and out and over and away, watching the flowers beneath me, the breeze, lifting me. Sunlight turning up my colours till they sing. And on the leaves below, the photons warm through the residue of who I used to be. And if you look up, you can see me, can hear the soft…

The sound of Tom Cruise in my living room when I called down from the top of the stairs. He flew planes while I held my tummy. (13) Helen, the military nurse, compared notes with me on back injuries. I watched ceilings unable to move. 36 hours awake and the third ceiling came into view. (14) The nurse with short hair or maybe a pony tail brought the rubber mask. While she explored, my laugh…

She faced herself in the mirror and asked. ‘Will you let me wear this black and white skirt, will you let me feel its coolness round my ankles?’ And she smiled. She asked again. ‘Will you let me wear my white cotton blouse, the one with Pre-Raphaelite sleeves and if you let me wear it, will you let me walk by the canal?’ ‘Will you let me use my small feet to make imprints in the warm…

Her thoughts moved to hands. She saw them cutting stems and tying, and tying turned into fingertips around the silk of cravats and fiddling with tie pins and buttons. But she couldn’t stay there long, lying, looking at her nails, gloss mirroring the sky. She observed her nails, now ruby, resonating with the velvet from her day. And more hands came, tousled up and pinned her hair while at her…

She supposed it was time to run across the beach again and she was right. She moved across in juddering frames in temperament with the kitchen chair, her clothes arranged, red top, black waistcoat and Mary Janes. The sand flies out, a response to her presence as the restaurant table slides in. White ceramic bowl of chicken salad and she runs. Feet shoving sediment, the bench in Brueton park and…

I wonder if it was now at 09:24 or later when the pulsing stopped. I don’t know the time but I know she cradled his heavy head in her arms. Arms I didn’t know back then, back then when I wasn’t alive. But I came to know her arms and we linked them, mine with hers, in the biting bluster of the moors.  And his heavy head in the chilled March light nestled in her warmth, a warmth he could rely on.…

It doesn’t matter that the sun has slipped behind my view for a while or that the amber hyacinth glass has lost its bright light. And then returns, irrepressible as though it never went away. How could it, how could the life force that keeps me here, have disappeared? The taste of my fingernails, just for a second and the bole of my May tree is hidden by the cacophony of daffs, just look at…

It’s early, from my window I can tell it snowed over night. I have no curtains up now, nothing to block out the sun when it comes.  Outside there are fresh ice crystals, six cornered stars and a thick layer that coats the streets, that demands to be looked at but not right now. Underneath it, is the névé from a four year storm. Some of it has melted and reformed but it lies there, foundational,…

If you study the shellac on your nails and lose yourself in its luminous magical lights, in the rainbow shot silver sparkle, it will take you back.  Take you back to just before, in the hours, in the safety, in the warmth before the sense of separation came. And there in the shimmerings is your father, walking home in the dark, your mother in the care of the midwives and the waiting. And he…

All I really need is the approaching night turning to undried ink in my rain. I need the splinters of headlights, tail lights dancing in the puddles and nestling down in red fleece I’ll rush. I won’t be long.  And I’m not.  And next door to the pharmacy I blur around under fluorescence for a while, conscious of my pocket once again. It rubs up against my thigh, reminding me and later all I…

In my warm mug of hot lemon and honey, the specks of cinnamon and cayenne pepper float about, they collide with the chunk of ginger and bounce off to the sides. I watch them try to make sense of the swirling forces, giving themselves up to the motion and the heat.  I think about the woman I brushed past at the hospital, the hug I couldn’t give her despite her need and my mind spins to the other…

I made my bed yesterday. I’ll make it again today. I’ll fold the weight of white bamboo sheets across the bottom of the bed and smooth it out. I need to smooth things out. And I wonder about the woman who’s preparing for the service on Tuesday. I’ve decided it’s a woman, though it might be a man, might be both, might be many I suppose. But for my purpose, she’s a woman and I imagine she makes…

Beetle in a box Box on an island Island in the ocean Ocean at my core

I suppose it was me and the clock, me and the concerned faces, me breathing and counting and getting nowhere. I suppose I don’t like being told that I can’t do something, so I try even harder for a while. A sense that to give up would be to fail. Now I can feel it’s me talking from exhaustion (much like this morning, in this world now.) A sense of the pressure I put on myself, but then as now,…