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

In Sunday school we used them to make crucifixes.
One clothespin at a time. We got them from the nun
who ran the school, in a shoe box marked with a cross,

the smell of codfish on the pins, their metal springs
strewn like silver minnows between the cardboard
and the wooden pieces. We used glue, beads, buttons;

mine had Christ sculpted with toothpicks and matches,
a red button for a crown. The nun, Sister Nola, liked
mine she said, very much, she said she liked suffering,

and she took me up to show her mother, upstairs.
We creaked up the dark and winding stairs, the ring
on her hand tap-tapped as she gripped the shiny banister.

I thought of my classmates still working on their crosses,
designing, gluing, placing their own ornaments. Sister Nola
Opened a door to a room, guided me inside, sat me down.

She walked away into another room. I sat and stared
at the dusty, worn furniture. Everywhere the musty
brown of old age, sadness. Sister Nola spoke in a whisper

to another person, and I thought of her mother, bed-
ridden, a sack of bones on a bed, as Sister Nola told us.
I heard laughter, or was it coughing? The clearing of phlegm

in a throat. A rustling of curtains or clothes or a pulled rug.
When Sister Nola returned, she was naked. She stood
in front of me. I saw her pale skin, the rivers of blue

veins on her waxen breasts, the dark nipples. Suddenly,
I could have fainted, but I sat there and looked at her
long enough to see a red halo form around her head.

I thought of the button I glued on as Christ’s thorns
on my crucifix. She held it in one hand, burning there,
a glow so bright I believed the sun had swallowed us both.