All My Mad Mothers

Jacqueline Saphra

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781911027201
• eBook ISBN: 9781911027348
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Jacqueline Saphra 's All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamourous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp.With an emphasis on the cultures of the different times, we tread a tantalising tightrope between the confessional and the invented. These astute poems step assuredly from childhood's first exposures to the scratched records and unsuitable lovers of young womanhood, the slammed doors of daughters and sons, the tears and salted soups of friendships, and the charms of late love. All the time, incandescent and luminous as an everlasting lightbulb, at the heart of each of Saphra's poems is a delicate filament kicking out a heavy-duty wattage.

II

Crete, 1980

I lived on hard boiled eggs and yoghurt

with a slug or ten of ouzo as my waist grew

waspish and my flesh indifferent

through my lean and solitary season.

I was girlish and abandoned, took my bed

of sand, those oh-so-green and casual boys

for granted, dreamed on beaches

naked, mouth grazed with the taste

of smoke and strangers’ kisses,

and I howled into the drunken dark for

stupid reasons and I thought

this was an education.

My first stepmother was blonde and clever. She was on my father’s arm when he came to collect me for annual holidays. My two fathers did not dislike each other and sat politely conversing on the sofa; one wielded his stethoscope, the other his paintbrush. It was not entirely clear which of them was in charge.

Getting into Trouble

Mr Giles said he didn’t want the school used as a political jousting ground and made me take the pro-abortion poster down, although I explained patiently that the ancient Romans didn’t mind it, that the church was okay with it in the 13th Century until quickening (when, they said, the soul enters the body), and the statute books condoned it.

Michelle, who was a Born Again, insisted life was ensouled even before conception; Clare believed that once the foetus was viable it had a right to exist, my mother said she didn’t believe in the primacy of the unborn, and I sat in biology wondering if I had a soul, and if I did, where it was. I daydreamed of knitting needles, coat hangers and permanganate.

After my mother came back from hospital – unharmed, grateful and political, only to find that my stepfather had spent her emergency money on canvasses and Carlsberg and dinner with that woman in Portobello Road, she sent me straight to the doctor to get myself a Dutch cap.

My boyfriend, who was stupid but useful, told all his friends I was a virgin and forced me to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind three times and listen to nothing but Genesis, which I preferred to The Sex Pistols, because I never believed there was No Future, not when my mother was, at least for now, empty-wombed and full of soul, as she stirred a pot of her famous lentil soup, not yet tied by blood to the man she loved.

Things We Can’t Untie

My boyfriend crashed the week before the concert

I’d been waiting for, as if he’d planned to miss it.

I took out Songs of Leonard Cohen, let the record

spin through silence, wiped it clean and put the stylus

where I wanted it, that smooth place in between

the grooves, and waited till it stuck: I’m not looking

for another I’m not looking for another I’m not looking

for another I’m not looking for another I’m not looking

for another. I sold my boyfriend’s ticket to a girl

with a hunger I could recognise, fought to the front

so Leonard knew my longings, gave me all his songs,

took my tears in return. Later, he signed his name

across my chest and sang Oh come with me my little one,

and when he touched my eyes, our kisses deep

and warm, and said We are so small between the stars,

so large against the sky, I couldn’t feel my boyfriend

any more: the leaning green of his Mohican or

The Guns of Brixton lurching through his boom box

that night he took the key of his Triumph Tiger,

scratched it loud across Songs of Leonard Cohen, left me

with a broken record, just because I wouldn’t ride

behind him, didn’t like to go that fast, because I said

I didn’t trust the brakes.

Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle

The first time Jan and Alice came for tea,

they smoked their roll-ups, held hands,

looked purposefully hard. My mother

filled their mugs and smiled a bit too much

before she welcomed them more formally: not

just my little brother’s best friend’s mothers,

but also sisters and iconoclasts. Quietly

I sat and braced myself. My mother said

alas she didn’t fancy women – no offence

to Jan and Alice – but even so, she longed to

get inside their heads and learn their tricks,

and what exactly di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author & this book