Amy Blakemore

The Hypocrite

 

 
It rained when you left Harlow terrace;
and you paid someone to pack up your things, carry them to the
delivery van, and put them in.
 
Teenagers; think:
you need them to man your chain stores
and do things like
load delivery vans with stale memories,
Chippendale and Tzu dynasty.
 
You watch them apprehensively as they carry out your hinged
goddess, brown and still and bound in masking tape. They scribble
'for the guest room'
on her left breast
in black ball-point pen.
 
Take note, Misters Chadwick Bradley & Spitzer, of the lines
bargaining their way across the mirror, and the mistress of
younger years who bruises a wineglasses' lush ellipse purple with
her lipstick.
 
Take note
of the scent of gambling men,
when car doors are opened.
 
Take note
the man who drives the microchip
into its affectionate hollow.
 
Take note:
the girl who shuffles notes behind
a coffee-ringed counter, and pours champagne into canals because                                     
she likes the sound it makes.
 
 

The Virgin of Guadalupe

 

 
From the playground to the park,
she tore indiscriminately,
her black hair wide behind her like a
rippling flag; dripping with catholica,
purple and gold rosaries at her snaky bodies' every juncture;
velvet ribbon and scraps of red lurex, blue Mary's and Theresa's
like lapis teardrops.
 
Through the city she blazed a trail
of hearts shot with wonder, her mouth became a lovely firetrap;
she smelt of vintage ephemera and cheap musk and men with
motorbikes.
 
They called her The Virgin Of Guadalupe, for all her galloping
faux-ruby finery, the nailgunned roses and weeping messiahs;
though the name was ironic.
You heard she mothered noisily
behind the bus shelter at dusk.
 
In the summer her hair would burn
and the shrines she kept behind her ears would melt, she'd tear
through the city in white ankle socks and not much else;
 
It won't be long, you see,
before she tears no more,
becomes a legend for the sewer's glitterati, and perhaps cleans
rooms in a hotel, somewhere.
 
 

Good Friday

 

 
I remember Good Friday,
and the cinnamon tea your mother made me to ease the pain -
 
it made me think of the last supper
and the strange demands made
over scalloped poor men's loaves.
 
Jesus' eyes deftly groping
through denial
 
pomegranate halves glistening like thousand-eyed heads, alive in
their scarlet, their own -
 
meatless blood.

 

 

 

Amy was a winning Foyle Young Poet in 2007 and 2008.

Back to issue 2