Philip Alvaré
A Picture of my Mother (Icarus Lamb)
The lamb she's cradling in her arms had the strange name Icarus.
Over time the emulsion on the deckle-edged black-and-white photograph
Has turned a mirror gray and flashes negative
Or positive depending on the angle - just like a holy
Card that shifts scenes between a crucifixion and the Virgin Mary
Or a fan dancer with plumes appearing and disappearing.
My mother looked every bit the part of a young married in her thirties
In the mid-fifties: starched white shirt with a Peter-Pan collar
Madras shorts, hair cut shoulder length and I can see that even though she's
Bottle-feeding a little black lamb whose mother abandoned
The lamb because he was black, she has a slash of ruby lipstick
That looks black in the nearly sepia toned brittle image that has curled
To the shape of a little bamboo flute that can never be completely
Unfurled, no more than the mystery of why my parents decided to name
The black sheep from the flock of Merinos they kept in their upper field Icarus.
Page(s) 31
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