Pauline Rowe has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Liverpool and recent pamphlets with Maytree Press. She hase also had work published by Driftwood Publications, Lapwing Publications, Headland Publications and Lark Lane Poetry Books: poems in North West Poets, Live Canon, Yaffle Press & Templar Poetry anthologies, The Interpreter’s House, Orbis, Morphrog, The Frogmore Papers, Smoke, The Rialto, Dreich, Smith’s Knoll, Iota and others.
Summer Travel
Two days escape for theatre with my girls, I’m heading back to my own claustrophobic daughterhood, my un-homed home oppressed by my father’s constant present tense. Thinking how in childhood, in my other hostage time, they murdered sleep in their marital ravings. Sleep’s a reward for virtue, so always unearned. The temperature relentless on the train. Coach E so overheated we are moved to First Class at no cost, cool air and foot room. My youngest girl plugged into Hamilton songs all the way to Crewe. Further down the carriage, a man’s raised voice in another language so exercised about his messages that he doesn’t realise, with the falling day, he’s missed his stop. Miles north of Milton Keynes it seems he has no way back tonight as we all speed on to Liverpool.
© Pauline Rowe
Patronym
Lloyd George knew my father – you say this in every conversation now. My father knew Lloyd George and I want to say: No he didn’t, dad. None of us knew your father. He’s the ghost that stays in your head, appears to warn us that the afterlife is longer than everyday shoe-cleaning, stew-making, repair and he removal of dust. Old men intrude in speech and thoughts, and dreams after years longer than their lives in ways we don’t understand. They make words appear like charms or curses as correctives and remonstrations. Like the way he called us ‘Attwood’s kids’using my mother’s maiden name as though all the cognoscenti of Widnes knew we were unworthy of his drunken patronym.
© Pauline Rowe
Awake
I’m on stand-by.
A small red light
in the dark.
Suspended
in clumsy fragments
between the liquid of sleep
and my body’s resistance.
My heart’s a clock
that sets itself
to wakefulness.
A bradycardia beat
that expects a car
to crash through
the front door
a kitchen fire arrhythmia
that fills the house with blooms
of cracked pepper smoke.
A tachycardia that waits
for a man to die in total silence
in the dark eaves of the house
before the day breaks.
© Pauline Rowe