Two Poems by Lesley Curwen

Chronicle

                            of all the bedding you and I have owned 
                     this white sheet bears our story pressed
                    on polycotton in serpentine script 
                        whose backs tails and tongues
                                  spell love whose sharpness 
                                              comes from the stamp
                                                       of verse on obverse 
                                                          whose familiar font 
                                                         scrawls a paisley pattern
                                                       whose shabby tract conveys
                                               a thousand forms of rapture
                                           so when it finally frays and parts 
                                            I will tear it by the seams to dusters 
                                                  and polish the furniture with our hearts

The giant green plastic bag

Once it held my mother’s hump or to be exact a moulded corset
in her humpen shape meant to stop
the kyphosis in its tracks.

Think of a piece of hard armour fitted around shoulders and trunk.
Solid and unforgiving,
not like her at all. 

When I took it out of the bag she made a childish face. I think she wore it
once for an hour. Five years
later she was bowed

like a penitent, eyes to the ground.
I was angry that she never
even tried. Her bent shape
put my world out of joint. 

Now I see that of all the prisons she endured,
this was the only one she could refuse. 

Lesley Curwen is a poet and broadcaster living by the sea in Devon. She sometimes writes about coercive control experienced by members of her family. Her work has  been Highly Commended in the Poetry Wales Award, and her collaborative pamphlet Invisible Continents has been published by Nine Pens. Other poems have been published by Broken Sleep, Atrium, The Alchemy Spoon, Arachne, Black Bough, and Green Ink.