Portrait in Which I Don’t Recognise My Mother by Charlotte Murray

Portrait in Which I Don’t Recognise My Mother

My grandmother traces her outline slowly,

a slender figure on Blackpool Prom

backlit by a smudge of illumination.

She is sixteen, trailing her longing

behind the rest of the family, the bold strokes

of her scowl dark as her hair.

On past the Tower and the Winter Gardens

in her blaring miniskirt, her mind dances

away beneath the strobing palette

of the Upstairs Downstairs with a boy

my grandparents never met, a fug of hairspray,

alcopops and cigarette smoke

blurring their limbs like sea fret.

It is 1980, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles

is still on her bookshelf, unread.

When I show the sketch to my mother

it turns to ash in her hands, the edges

curling as they char into a dark gap

in memory’s album. She pulls out

an insipid watercolour of herself at twenty,

holding hands with the trainee accountant

who will offer her an eraser in the shape

of a ring. An heirloom lovingly inscribed

with silences no one will fill.

Charlotte Murray is a Creative Future Writers’ Award winner from West Yorkshire. She is also a past winner of the Prole Laureate Competition and EHP Barnard Poetry Prize. She has been published in various magazines including Propel, Amsterdam Quarterly and The Broken Spine, and is forthcoming in fourteen poems. She is a member of Hive Poetry Collective. Twitter: @charlouwriter.