![]()
Amelia Loulli
Amelia Loulli is a writer and actor living in Cumbria. Her poetry has been twice shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, awarded second place in the Battered Moons Poetry Competition and longlisted for the London Magazine Poetry Prize. A member of the Kendal Brewery Poets, she was also shortlisted for Primers: Volume Three.
![]()
Rock-a-bye Baby
Once, my sister died, and Mum and Dad
were swapped
with players who pretended that food
could still be swallowed, and nights were still
for sleeping
and only the way they said my name, as though
its syllables were wrong, as though it ended
the wrong way
could prove what I knew: none of them
were coming back.
What happened to her body is
they burned it
on a bonfire, like when the Guy gets scorched
every black November. I had to stay behind, still
very much alive
and arrange myself small among the sofa cushions
trying to hide, hoping I might trick them and they would
come home,
tired and smelling of charcoal.
Afterwards, nothing was said
of her toes,
how small they must have been inside a box that big. I imagined
they would have counted them, a habit is a habit after all,
this little piggy
so still, and never tickled, and they never once forgot
to buy cereal, or to collect me from school, but sometimes
when they thought
I was sleeping, they stood together behind my bedroom door,
silent and hidden and crying in time to every nursery rhyme
I’d ever been sung…
Baby, baby, where have you gone?
baby, baby, please come home, baby, baby,
we kept the wrong one.
![]()
When I Was Little
Mum smoked the cigarettes
and Dad kept the guns
and this was the best way around
because Mum had destruction
tattooed on her breast bone and Dad
kept himself to himself.
And I weighed myself at 6pm
every Tuesday to see
what I continued to be made of
which was only ever a bit
of both of them
and too much of everything else.
And the loft housed a creature called Boris
who heard my secrets at night
and made me run fast as a bullet
up the stairs beneath his hatch
and sometimes when I sat on the loo
and bent my head to the left
I could see his fingers trying to escape.
So I closed the door but the light was broken
and the girls at school all told me
we couldn’t be friends unless I was brave.
Brave enough to stand in front
of the blackened mirror and chant
Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, thirteen times
to the wicked Queen’s face.
And once when I screamed,
Dad slapped me so hard across my cheek,
his fingers stayed there, red as menses for days,
and mum laughed like a film star
through clouds of her own smoke,
every time I told her
I was afraid.
![]()
Something in the Blood
like the inhibitor you don’t have
the inhibitor
which makes you swell
but never bruise
which has never stopped you
throwing yourself
at hard things
walls and doors
and even harder things
which show themselves
in your fists
like balloons
filled with sand
your inflated face
none of us recognise
so much more
lips and skin
than we have ever seen
and the words you spit
when Dad removes
the spoon handle
which he slides
lubricate...
