by Anita Jean
Hello lifting light, I am yours.
You can take me in the paleness that earns colour on the skin.
Your touch is the only one my body accepts.
I am glad to be felt by your warmth. Suspended in your rising, it is good to be held.
The lonely are clothed by winter.
by Kate Mounce
Dream of sweated air, Third World intimation,
where there’s seasoning fruit yet in trading skin.
Being white, I’m told, my touch means millions
and all smiles from young skirts, thigh high,
are received and returned with a wink.
Gathering pimps bow, chattering gratitude for pittance
‘My girls, thank you, please, please..’
Awake
I keep a son not yet five,
Pooh-bear blind and stubborn to bed.
His will be a private education,
producing a nose for fine substances;
every bruise a victory,
a contemporary Croix-de-Guerre.
For all her potions, his mother will gain more loose skin and years;
will send her love, our hopes, on headed notepaper to his dorm.
Whilst she sleeps,
I handshake out of a vision of dusky petite workers
eyes planting the ground.
by Kate Mounce
I imagine
therefore I am
unquenchably happy, thin,
better looking up close than in magazines,
unreasonably talented
(still not smug, nor unable to work in a group).
I imagine
projects designed by me
parting the rolling red sea of consumer-driven life
for countless disaffected youths
who thus become
Wall Street protégées, or
Downing Street darlings, or better yet
First-on-the-quick-dial consultants to the UN,
and whose phoned thanks
my red-eyed colleagues’ ‘Eureka!’s drown,
an agitated white flock impatient to squeeze
my tumour-healing hands,
all
before retiring
to the more capacious of my chateaux.
And then
blissful, irreproachable couplings.
Eating my cake
In the bed I have made,
scoffing and scoffing,
‘til the effort produces golden sweat on my skin.
Knighthoods
Commemorating benches in hospital wards
Prizes for kindness
Copycat hairstyles
Invitations to lecture
Sojourns on the Riviera
Openings of my penthouse collection
Runs at The National
Runs international
Aid without end to the Third World
and
A Glorious Send-off.
From my shadowed front door
innumerable beneficiaries
weep Diana-long garlands along my estate
to crest the gatekeeper’s post.
And then I sense
the taking down of decorations,
morning searing along the horizon of my eyelids,
the waking shock of the outdoors in my throat.
And deeper still
I hear,
The slowing whir
of a projector
turned
off.
