In the color room in Manchester / nesting amongst the scraps / she coughed up a menagerie / with thicker strokes / filling herself up on bubblegum trees / bizarre and beautiful / a time when hair was rebellion / when people shouted wear a hat / to show you up or shove you down / and my Gran kept her lips in the jam pot
In a sitting room in Bethnal Green / the gruff voice survived / pointing out where the breaks should be / amongst the bodiless / women knitted socks for sons / and kids played on tips / the only greening in a name / as people ate their pets for Christmas dinner / and my mother stained her lips with beetroot
In a sick room in Connecticut / listening to the radio / an old woman says / she’d just eaten a teaspoon of toothpaste / to fool herself that she was full / and a young woman was snatched from life / running along a manmade river / and suddenly I find / I can’t recite my own poems / and my lips are bloodless
But we shouldn’t have to eat our feelings / or watch our children go to war / we shouldn’t have to walk down the street with a key knuckle duster / or skip our silence into rivers / or have it buried underground /so let’s all draw our red lines on our lips / and dare anyone to cross them
Loose Lips
Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who now lives in America. Her prose and poetry have been widely published in journals and anthologies such as Every Day Fiction, Grey Sparrow Journal, Anti Heroin Chic, Gyroscope, and Janus Lit. Adele has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for poetry and short fiction and Best of the Net for poetry. Finishing Line Press published her first poetry chapbook, Turbulence in Small Places. Her second collection, The Brink of Silence is available from Bottlecap Press and her novella-in-flash, Wannabe, was published by Alien Buddha Press in May