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the poet
Widely published in print and online, Louise Longson is the author of Hanging Fire and Songs from the Witch Bottle: Cytoplasmic Variations. She won the inaugural Kari-Ann Flickinger Literary Memorial Prize with her upcoming collection These are her thoughts as she falls, and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. She was also Highly Commended in The Hedgehog Poetry Press' second A Proper Poetry Pamphlet Competition in July 2024. Translated through the twin prisms of myth and nature, Louise's poetry brings together her personal and professional experiences – she's worked for many years with survivors of trauma at Rape Crisis, as well as with charities focused on alleviating loneliness and supporting mental health recovery.
the poems
Drowning on Dry Land
We go in a drought year, and she remembers
a sacrifice that was made to the god of Water,
when the village was buried under the flow
that ate the river and the broad pale fillet
of rock where she used to bathe and fish.
Huge metal bulldozers rumbled like tanks,
planes practiced overhead for a dam-busting raid
over the water, unaware of the irony. Twisting
streets she walked to school and clean white stone
houses became slack and rubble. The foundations
of her childhood crumbled away with them.
In this dry summer of baked mud, the reservoir breaks
its silence. The village has come up, gasping for air.
Her memory gushes out in a flood of nostalgia
that is hard to bear. It is a hunger, remembering.
An ache that hurts more than all the forgetting.
By spring, it will slip back beneath the water
and she, too, will be gone. Only a pile of sad stone
remains; the shaped and faced remnants
of a former beauty. History will hold them;
both no longer existing and existing at once
in an ellipsis of space, a lacuna of fluid time.
Battered Woman
That’s what she was called, back then,
like something you’d get from a chip shop.
She was the chicken on a spit
with the life cooked out of her.
Pasty skin, pied with bruises
ebbing in colour from Baltic-blue-black
to sick mushy-pea-green.
Dried ketchup in her nostrils, split
lips. Told by her mother
she’d made her bed and must lie in it,
she could have her cake
but couldn’t eat it. Knowing her place
is in the queue, waiting her turn
until he shouts.
Who’s next?
Wrap her up in words: newspaper
stories said she screamed
so quietly
the neighbours never heard.
Nobody saw her
until she slipped back
into the waters; disappeared
with the slap of tailfin
and quicksilver flash.
I trawl for her in my dreams.
How I Find and Lose
My Mother
Hope is what keeps her going
down the street, to the unremarkable house
that, like her, needs a new coat
of paint. To be repointed, given
an extension.
I only had twelve weeks.
She comes with a shopping bag and
a social worker. It’s a crash course
in redemption. Pass, and we can leave
together. Fail and we will be sent off
discretely in different directions.
We were never left alone. Each moment
of interaction kept in a detailed logbook.
You were to be picked up, hugged, fed, changed
into a non-risk situation. But, sleep deprived,
there were two things I could not keep:
my anger at bay and you.
Now, forty years later, she tells me
her story. History scrapes me, scribing
pain onto my scrimshawed bones. Here I am.
Unbroken, whole, and as perfect to her
as the day she walked away, alone.
We only have twelve weeks.
Publishing credits
Drowning on Dry Land: The High Window (Summer 2023)
Battered Woman: Songs from the Witch Bottle: Cytoplasmic Variations (Alien Buddha Press)
How I Find and Lose My Mother: Allegro Poetry Magazine (Issue 30)