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JACKIE EVANS
I am one of the longest standing members of the workshop. It surprises me to realize how many years I have been here (but still enjoying it!). My travel writing is on the back burner for the moment. This year I have made an attempt at a short story and now poetry - especially as I want to express some feeling about pregnancy, which is a new creative venture for me, in itself.
The Scan
A morning after Christmas
Snowflakes wander from a blank sky
Shrunk on the cocoon of a hospital waiting room
Where we fidget, play with pamphlets
Inside the scan room
Is gloom, an empty monitor, the window to hopes and fears
I lie down, belly exposed and vulnerable
The technician hesitates.....too long
Controlling fear and hope in her silence
And I will from you, a look, a word
But your gaze is turned away.
Then, across the blank screen
Drifts an image from another planet
An astronaut floats
Attached to ship by a living cord
Waves through the porthole of the womb
As if on a trapeze.
Eight weeks on your power grows
Each vertebra glows
White in amoeba translucence
Strange fish of another time
But....millimetres under my skin.
The Unknown
I am the unknown in your belly
Unseen, unvoiced, but
When you move, I am still
When you are still I stretch, tumble, wriggle,
I like this best at night.
For each breath I take half
And squash your stomach into your lungs
And clamber the cage of your ribs.
Your food is mine
I push your belly into a swelling pod
You sit
I make your clothes twitch
Your taut, drum-like skin ripples like wind on water
Nudging, sucking like a sea anemone,
An organ that has come adrift.
You walk
I'll make you stop
By dancing on your cervix
Breakdancing, testing a few moves.
You sleep
I wake you
On the hour....sometimes
Your bladder squeezed to a runner bean
Your pee a tiny trickle.
I've got a rhythm now
A twilight world
Washed by dappled light and dark
Of mumbled sounds.
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