“The Aunties” and other poems by Josephine Corcoran

Honeymoon   I wouldn’t call it a honeymoon, those muffled nights in mothballed rooms. With cake in the boot we pilgrimmed north, taking a young marriage to old widows,   my father’s brothers dead, their crucifixes still hanging. In each house we were given the double bed, my aunties inviting us to fornicate   on concave mattresses holding dead men’s seed. Had we come one week before, you would have been given nothing but dusty blankets on a downstairs floor,   and I would have sunk, alone and deep, into the mildewed sponge of a cousin’s bed. My aunties would have spread as wide as angels in their marital sheets,   their doors ajar, the solemn whispers of their night-time prayers beating as sweet as deathbed love-making. But our wedding vows were said,   so we sipped tea on upright chairs still dimpled from Brylcreemed heads, and rolled like screws in sideways jars on shelves in locked-up sheds.      Seven years, one son, one daughter later, Jesus has been sent to us. (The aunts are gone, their houses stripped) His legs are broken (long marriages skipped,   thrown into landfill) and we laugh when our little children ask about our honeymoon. I see you dreaming down our garden path as you hold the broken body in your hands.   He was nailed to the Anaglypta. You are picturing the twist of wire you’ll use to bind his legs; the nail, the hammer, the spirit level, the pencil mark the place he’ll eternally outstare us.   I love the way our daughter sings as her finger traces our wedding rings.   Dead Sisters Maria and Elizabeth Brontë, died aged 11 and 10   So young to be marooned here, we spend our pain on travelling dreams, skating over frozen seas, following their inky maps, our boats to Gondal trapped on battered moors. We straddle the backs of galloping hares, fly flat on the wings of marble- eyed hawks grown dragon-sized, since in our dreams we are as tiny as toy soldiers. We cry for them to carry us beyond mountains and frog-filled lakes.   They shake in their beds. The travelling box lies waiting. We tiptoe on lopsided floors, watch the news from Angria ripple over them in sleep, whisper We mustn’t keep you any longer.   They have laid out shadows and attics and mists.   We disappear.   The Aunties   Brewing tea in our kitchen we snort, remembering you screaming to your mother we were witches. Behind her back we flew to fetch biscuits, you said. We were trees in the dark who followed you home, the lampposts that tiptoed after you to blind your unclenched eyes.   We fed you trifle, persuaded you we hadn’t eaten your mother, that shadows were not black blood against a sunlit wall. You understood she was drinking wine, there was no hole in her side where we’d ripped you from her, and you knew that knives were for cake and the crusts of sandwiches.   You threw careless waves to your mother, ran into our house like a spring tide, the seagulls laughing; the old tricks had worked again.   Gasps and Sighs   Is it because we fell from our nests before we knew we had wings? that we remember our heads crowned in pain? our upended legs? is it because our wombs are falling? a lament? does all this explain the gasps and sighs we hear on landings, through half-opened doors, when we are burglars at the top of the stairs, imagining ourselves beating through rooms, stealing nothing?   Thanks for Not Switching Me Off   I’ll have no concept of time so, no rush, and I may fail to respond to painful stimuli, and to sound, but don’t let that stop you from playing me The Three Degrees singing When Will I See You Again? because even though I may be oblivious to the doctor tipping light in my eyes from her sterilised torch, that doesn’t mean I won’t see again Miss Travis, Miss FitzSimons and Mrs Cuthbertson, or rather, three sixth-form girls on the stage, done up as them, in gabardine raincoats, sturdy shoes, clear plastic rain bonnets, doing the moves, singing hooo_ooh, haar_aarr, precious mo_ments! (The Three Degrees Fahrenheit! came the shout)   and wheeled to the daylight I’ll shake again, a laughing girl again in a sea of other laughing girls – when the future flung open the world’s windows, our lives soared in.   I’ll fly again with oxygen in my blood – that was the first time I understood love when I dared to look at the three of them on the day of their retirement. They laughed too, their rock-hard curls trembling, tears bright on their bat-wing glasses. We never knew if they liked the carriage clocks, if they ever set their hearts ticking.   I Remember the Fear of Forgetting   I remember the fear of forgetting the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the cuffs of my school blouse. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, his pregnant wife, are hiding in my pencil case. The Black Hand, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia aren’t visible until I creep my skirt three inches up my thigh and Sarajevo, 28 June 1914 is folded so small it’s a blister on the sole of my foot.   I take Gavrilo Princip to my lips; I would rather swallow ink than hand him over.   The Aunties & other poems are © Josephine Corcoran

Josephine Corcoran left school early with few qualifications. She returned to full-time studying when she was 30 which was when she started writing and submitting her work for consideration. She has two BBC Radio 4 credits, for a play and a short story, and one of her plays was produced at the Chelsea Centre Theatre in London. She has been writing poetry seriously since 2010 when she was a runner-up for the Bridport Prize. She has been published or is forthcoming in, among other places, The Rialto, Under the Radar, The Manchester Review, New Walk and Poetry Wales. Her pamphlet The Misplaced House was published by tall-lighthouse in November 2014. She edits the poetry site And Other Poems. http://www.josephinecorcoran.wordpress.com