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Chap Book #6 The Fragile Knots of Time

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  Kintsugi    I see myself stockpiling useless rubbish, broken and disintegrating bits. I do not need them. I must simply let them go. Boxes of broken sculptures are holding me back. I am the deconstruction, I have ruined myself, and I cannot be fixed easily. I begin confidently saying to myself, “I can fix it… I can mend it”… but this is untrue. Only the Great I Am can repair this broken thing I have become. Only They can mend the un-mendable, redeem the irredeemable, fix the unfixable. In my brokenness, in my weakness, in my fragmentation, I have a strength in the hope that the fragile knot of time can be undone, then strongly reknotted. The Author of the Universe is the artisan craftsperson who is creative and inventive. They mend with slivers of gold in the Kintsugi way. The golden repair, the golden join, making me whole again. Making beauty out of an undoing. Perhaps I am never going to be ready or fully comprehend this gift. But I am working
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Blackbird Egg Time slows down in the Victorian mirror. She is haunted by every face that checked themselves in the glass. She is on the cusp. A life about to begin in earnest, on the tipping point of adulthood. On the apex of future relationships, sexuality and desire. “Yes” she says, “that’s me in the mirror”, long brown hair, grey-blue eyes. She is just an ordinary brown bird. But common or garden blackbirds create sky eggs, objects of beauty and desire. Each one speckled slightly differently in the genus. If only she can create of herself such an object of yearning, her small brownness will be worth the transformation. On the Hall-stand crafted in a grand antique style, are a collection of blackbird’s eggs. Saved in small glass containers with their lids tight shut. Through the glass she sees pale blue specked eggs, broken with raggedy edges. The armoire ominously overshadows her slight fourteen year old self. Whom she sees reflected back in multiple mirrors, framed in the warm glea

Chap Book #3 Gone With The Wind

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  Delighted to be published in:-  https://www.cistaarts.com/product-page/chapbook-series-3-gone-with-the-wind Learning craft from the wind   There was once a woman. Who learned craft from wind, art from the sea and design from the earth. She sewed intricate organic patterns in labyrinthine repeats. Her creativity was celebrated through the land. She was known as La Corachine, beautiful shell of the sea. Her daughter Powys was as natural as the elements, precious as comfort and radiant with gold-nature. One day an old woman coloured like an autumn day came to their door. “I want what is yours.” She said, and stuck a pin into the girl, who transformed into a brown-bird and flew off. “Old woman”, cried the mother, please cook a meat and potato pie for us. “Of course”, she sang, catching the brown-bird-daughter. And made her into a pie with potato skins. The leftover bones she threw into a corner of the garden. In three days, a beautiful tree grew there. I

Collect Art Publication July 2023

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 First published in Collect Arts Summer 2023 edition Stone all the flowers   The year of the art school tutorials. The difficult woman you are to me, and the difficulty I present to you. The year of my recovery and your husband’s death.   Your husband fails and worsens through the days of our trimesters together. As he weakens and declines, I grow incrementally stronger. As if terrible fatalistic scales of balance, set and reset.   Do not cheat her. Give her a full measure of time and experiences with him. Pressed down, shaken together and overflowing. She, in the face of all this decay   Chooses to destroy flowers with stones. Until their purple hearts stained the cartridge with their elemental pigments.   She cuts the flowers only to waste them in the parching sun. It is the cycle of being and unbeing, the grass withers and the flower fades (Isiah 40:8). She decides to press her flowers till their lungs burst on fine cotton Lawn.   Flower tortu

Chap Book #5 Confronting the unknown

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  Delighted to be published in: Chapbook #5. Confronting the unknown:   Bridges By Frances-Ann Norton   Her story is a molten mirror, white hot with reflected truth. Her almost-escape haunted her. Reliving it at odd quiet moments in her monotonous day at the production pottery. She had nearly been free, changed forever. Her hand was on the car door-handle as the light turned from green to orange to red. It was a turning point but she did not turn, a chance not taken. This time.   Later at work surrounded by bisqueware, she sobbed for an hour in the dust. Her escape-plan, her dream lover, was an illusion, beautifully cooked up. She was an automaton, every emotion tamped down. Feeling was dangerous. In the studio signing pottery in rich red oxide and then dipping the bases in boiling wax, She stood there like an Egyptian hieroglyph, arms raised above the hot wax, pot in hand, thinking. Piecing out her story until it reached this fulcrum.   Even
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  https://www.haus-a-rest.com/new-page-72 Fantastic to have two poem selected for the Haus-A-Rest zine issue 39. Artschool and what it did or did not tell you.  The Ontological Art School and What I Learned There In a game of solitaire, I am dealt a number of random cards – these are my social locators. Where and when I was born and my parents, these things are out of my control. Just like the cards I have been dealt. Knowing and understanding my locators is like playing a game strategy. Making the best use of the cards I have. This is my ontology of the art school. My parents met at post-war art school in the 1940s. Their evenings were filled with philosophical and art theory discussions at the jazz clubs. The ontological context of the art school for me was in the wider community too. My sister and I grew in a network of artists, musicians, poets and designers. I thought everyone lived like this. We I spent our chodhood in the corridors and classrooms of the loc

Five Pandemic Poems

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 Five Pandemic Poems 1. Solitary 2. At the bird sanctuary 3. Writing practice 4. Closing the chapter 5. Icon eyes                                              Image from Unsplash Open Source. 1.  Solitary  I could be a fifty-three-year-old woman. Living post-cancer. In a world where cancer is suddenly not the biggest, baddest virus on the Block. All the emotions I dealt with about a growing death within me. Harbouring an enemy in my breast. My habits during illness of self-imposed quiet, solitary days. The lore of stay home, stay safe. Now everyone experiences this in the time of lockdown, in a pandemic.                                              Blackbird Rainbow, by Frances Ann Norton 2.  At the bird sanctuary Its so hard growing up, my beautiful brave girl. The moment you were put into my arms after a long labour I knew you were a fighter, an old soul, determined and singular. You withstand your greatest health burden with magnanimity, dignity and stoic