Claire Crowther
Magma Showcase: Claire Crowther
The Rarity of Funeral Parlours
On access day, she buzzes round her mother,
crossing off their differences of opinion.
Packs a penny-handle bag. Clings,
inside the wardrobe, to her clothes, her back
against raw wood. In the conservatory,
under the blue-tinted perspex roof,
her separated father waits
to take her shopping. Leaves like glittering
birds flap above the alleyway.
“There’s not one single death shop in the mall,”
she says to her father, spookily
good-looking in the unexpected sun.
He points out there’s more to do than die
on the High Street. Back home, body
warmers, skirts and cropped tops smell
garlicky, damp, as where pine hedges
a meadow carpeted with crushed stems.
Claire Crowther’s poems have been published in a wide variety of British and North American journals including TLS, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, PN Review and Ambit. Her pamphlet The Glass Harmonica was published by Flarestack Press in 2003, and her first collection is forthcoming from Shearsman Press in March 2007.
Page(s) 37
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