Chap Book #5 Confronting the unknown

 

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.

 

Eventually she left without ever deciding to go.

Exiting without the drama of broken promises flung in her face.

She never went back.

Not to that house, the chickens, the job in the pottery.

Not to the man she married on a cold close-to-Christmas morning.

Something had to give but she had already given everything.

She left when her hands and her heart were empty, when she had nothing left.

Only then she was free to step away from that life.

To rise up out of the Jordan.

To discover who she was in this new deliverance.

...

Chapbook Series #5 ‘Confronting the Unknown’
Collection of Poems & Stories
 
British Library Cataloguing Publication Data:
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-916635-31-9
First Published September 2023
 
All texts are subjected to Copyright © by the Authors.
Copyright © 2023 by Mehri Publication Ltd. \ London.
Copyright © 2023 by Cista Arts Ltd. \ London.
All rights reserved.

 

 


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