Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Three November-December 2024
Aotearoa Poets and Writers Special Edition
Love’s Labours, poems by Sophia Wilson.
Love’s Labours
The heirs of all eternity are crossroads, each with many forks
Every turn costs us. The coat comes apart at its seams
Nothing is as it seems, Daughters!
See the billboards with their cautionary slogans —
Tired? Stop and rest! Let driving distract you from your peers…
Weak advice!
The hours are rushed. The air is thick and palpitating
Ping Ping Ping, hearts incoming
snare the eyes and pluck your small-boned hands
In the beginning — two cells fusing — we did not ask
What era is this? What trauma? What dire straits?
At what point will the spindle draw blood?
I would be the road, the oxygen, the ambulance for you
I would laugh in death’s throat
if it would change this plot
Ping ping ping A line is crossed. The path is split
A carriage plunges into darkness
Ineluctably the curse descends
rendering a child paralyzed and mute
And mirth will not move us. And love cannot save us
from the play’s horrific denouement
composing hors d’oeuvres
for my mother
1. glio- (prefix): glue or clay
like glial cells supporting the integrity of neurones
you were our insulation and our scaffold
modulating talk around the wooden table
fostering community with feasts
2. multiform (adj): assorted, diversified
star-anise potatoes, eggplant masala
jellied ox tongue, caper berries
lemon-crumbed lamb’s brain
fragrant rice!
3. blast (verb): to blow up or break apart
you are expert at exploding tasteless glass
we duck for shelter from your extremes —
rancid butter, rotten fruit, the uncontrolled
proliferation of crude consonants
fuck damn blast
4. stoma (noun): an opening, or mouth
your once generous palate grates our nerves
I score your mind’s eye, always dealing
loaded with too much salty
then upturning us with tender jaggery
sleep-walking to affairs with stove and fridge
your labile memory sets off smoke alarms
5. multiforme (med.): highly variable, suggestive of necrosis
to appease you we indulge your idiosyncrasies —
thyme and turmeric television, chili-vanilla mirrors
all the while steeling your silver for the medics
we spoon the erudite officials — how it was, your ideal dish —
not this tarnished tasting platter executed by a wayward-tongue
6. –oma (suffix): morbid growth
all of history is bound up with fragments —
mutant shells to snap a tooth
the tumour is affecting how we operate
while listening to another simmering specialist
— draw a clockface, name the king —
you are a child carrying out your first performance;
how to please symbolic fathers with old spice
7. blast (noun): bud, sprout, cell of embryonic origin
strong gust of wind, destructive wave of highly
compressed air spreading out after an explosion
the breaking of bad news
the breaking out of sobbing
we break with primitive emotions
raw, unsheathed, regressive
there are no dining tables here, nor windows
naught but empty goblets line your cell
the walls necrose, the ceiling slimes and rots
time collapses, curtains fall
8. Glioblastoma Multiforme: aggressive brain tumour
this is umami and you are saffron, Mother
your skull of sweetbreads swallowed by a wolf
coherence is irretrievable
your absence, a sieve we pour ourselves into
9. form: (noun) the particular configuration in which something exists
or appears. (verb) the bringing together of parts to create new shape
or meaning
our last supper is a tender parting —
meaningful
despite the shambles of the buffet
I write for you, beloved atmosphere
whose petaled motifs
once ran rosewater
over us all
© Sophia Wilson
Sophia Wilson grew up on unceded Anaiwan land in Australia and is currently based in rural Ōtepoti Dunedin. An arts graduate and former mental health worker, she is the recent recipient of awards for poetry including the Hippocrates Prize, the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize and the Robert Burns Poetry Competition. Her poetry collection Sea Skins was published by Flying Island Books in 2023.