Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

1. The Scissors Mother

There are days
when she becomes a mirror
of twin swords.

She can be folded up
to keep life tidy,
but do not store your mother
away in a drawer;

she prefers to nestle
inside your pocket,
handy and sensible,
able to slice out spaces.

2. The Scissors Daughter

She is intrigued by my steel blades
and afraid to touch them

as I sharpen each one lovingly,
pass it over a grinding wheel,

those same blades that she polished
ensuring the points were sterilised.

She would engrave her name there
if she could: I made you she says

but I think she is bewildered
that I am her daughter.

3. Irreversible

I stroked the glossy cascade,
took my round-end, safe-blade scissors.
A swish here and there, a change of style.
The crunches were as satisfying as eating.

But then the fringe went jagged,
the sides didn't match
and soon we were snipping our way
from hairdressing to surgery.

Feathers of hair fluttered.
Her skull bristled like a meadow
that had been burned to the ground.
My doll's smile was a red slash.

I left the scissors open.

4. Losing the Scissors

My mother was attached to her scissors
as if she had invented them herself:
the Wilkinson Sword variety with black handles.

When they went missing, once a week or so,
the windows sealed, doors closed
and the family was buried underground.

We strained our eyes for the glint of a leg
jutting out from the bed or sofa
or a spike from a sheaf of papers.

Nobody owned up; we hovered, not knowing
if a rivet would hold our mother together
until her finest instrument was found.

5. The Blackened Hand

She wanted to cut herself out of life
with the cleanest of incisions,
leaving us an immaculate scar
which would heal then fade.
She poured down painkillers and swallowed.

Her face started its gentle collapse.
I dared not hold her blackened hand
as it rested, a fan of bones on the pillow.
I traced the shape she nearly left behind,
far larger than she had ever been.

Like the blades of her household scissors
we touched only in two places:
fingertips to wrist, lips to cheek.
Still we curved inwards, magnetically,
a sliver of daylight separating us.

My mother clawed her way back.
Even she didn't know how or why. 

6. The Cut-up

Scissors flick together
with the rhythm of silver wings
when they divide words.

After seven days of gestation
I shake up the fragments
and spill them into the world.

A stream of unborn children,
they scatter across the table.
I sit in silence as they play.

I do not try to understand
or glue them down on paper.
They arrange themselves.

It is possible to give birth
over and over. I imagine myself
with one steel hand
cutting through light.

7. Umbilical

I'm told the midwife's hands
were so broad that she cupped
my squirming body in one palm.

When she gripped those scissors,
disinfected to a sparkle,
I wonder if my mother watched

and how it sounded,
the percussion of that crunch.

8. The Manicure

I hold the small scissors with curved blades
and say nothing about the smears of nicotine
streaking her fingers. I know she dabs them
with neat bleach before the doctor comes.

Reds, blues, purples, ambers and pinks.
My mother has old, rainbow hands
that look as if she tried to dye them and failed,
as if she soaked them in hot water for a century.

Her fingers are long and slender enough
to have played the clarsach like a lover.
Instead she learned to type, launder
and nurture, keeping her nails clipped.

I tell her my fingers will bunch
into sausages in middle age, and we laugh.
She inspects my nails, under siege for decades,
so she never had to trim them for me.

It was once believed that fingernail cuttings
should be disposed of with care
or they would return and wreak a curse.
I snip my mother's nails onto a newspaper

and observe them for the first time:
sickles of pearl splinters of moon
the only part of her that grows now.
I let the scissors go, and hold my mother's hands.