Liz Atkin
The Normal Control
The Figs were her friends,
sneaked down from the top shelf
in a 1930s medical tome.
Grey naked against a black background
with inches down the right,
some of them with a ‘normal control’
that she imagined to be
cooks’ or gardeners’ children
made to stand naked also
alongside the medical meat
emphasising the dwarfing deformities
and syndrome-contorted bodies.
Long stay, short lived children
with clean soapy mouths
that never once said cheese
to their cold photographer,
doctors’ lines on their bodies
like marking for butchers’ cuts
under arc lamp rays,
not even a black strip,
a lidless letterbox in the face,
to preserve their anonymity.
So for years she’d take Figs
from numbers 168 to 195
out into the garden to play
clothed in her imaginary games
full of muffled giggling,
all of them ignoring the distant Mother
who thought her ugly daughter
was just teasing the fairies.
Page(s) 53
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