Alicia Stubbersfield
My Mother's Coat
Snow is falling and the scene is Dickens,
across the road the Rotary Club sing
Silent Night and I want to cry.
We are delivering presents and wait
for the door to open into the dark hall
of my grandfather’s house
where the Virgin Mary holds out
her hands to us although the plaster
of her blue gown is faded and pockmarked.
Snow speckles my mother’s coat,
the thick fur so glossy it shrugs off
wetness, seems barely touched by it.
The colour is horse-chestnut,
shiny ones prised from half-open cups,
its lining dove-grey silk
embroidered with posies of pink and blue,
hand-sewn, my mother says when I stroke it.
Her initials, MJU, stitched in great loops
on the inside pocket, but when I look again
I find the name Dotty Cohen underneath.
Bought three years after my father died
with her own money now she’s a teacher,
she wears it to the golf club,
to parents’ evenings at my school
when other mothers wear anoraks.
The collar smells of faded French perfume,
she snuggles into it outside her in-laws’ house.
Page(s) 29
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The