In ‘S c r a p e of time’ and ‘Womb Dream’, Laetitia Erskine takes a vivid dive into the sounds and rhythms of memory and dreamscapes, all the way back to the womb itself.
Sc r a p e of time
Near silent paws of our cat treading the floorboards
A duet with the hammer of your typewriter through the night
And in the morning the scrape of the curtain hooks
You opened them every day as I opened my eyes
The will you put to each dawn
Shamed my growing limbs
Between sleep and day, the bony heft of you rose, rose again in the room below
A shape unseen that scored a memory echoing with that scraping sound
I cast my line to years to come
Knowing that sound would scrape scrape
And I might still
Know
Nothing
The day you died I walked I stood
Our cat walked in the garden
Outside your study window
I could feel its dark stare behind me
The desk the same
Untouched but already shaped
I knew the pot, the pad, the cigarette box
Wondered if our cat knew too
But could not wonder then how long I would hear
The phantom tread of floorboards
The hammer and the scrape of time
Womb Dream
The red
The dark
The dark red beat
The dark
The red
The beat
I rose in the night
Jolt of current in the curtained room
My sister was sleeping
My voice
Was trapped
A thrum was rising – a drum thick as breath
Not verbal
Too palpable
Drifting to my mother
Down silent stairs
Bright shafts through the door
Burble of a lit TV
Furled in her gown
I curled on her heart
My self too large
Through my whole head I listened
Nested to wait at the gate of an impossible contour
The beat
The beat
The red dark beat
A knot
Unravelled through us
A coil of it
Unspooled
A bubble
A laugh
Spilled from my lips
‘That was no bad dream,’ said my mother
Gave me the slip
As if she didn’t know
The message she had written herself
Climbing back
To my room
In shadow
Opaque as old thoughts
My sister slept on
Delicate pulse of life, wash of sound, flickering filament
Primitive electricity, a force in the swim of it
Immersed alone
Seeing blind
But fused
In the dark
Beat
Of the womb
The beat the dark the dark red beat of the womb
About Laetitia Erskine
Laetitia Erskine is a writer based in London. She most often writes about love, loss, and women’s experience, and explores the boundaries between daily life and the metaphysical, in variously surreal, absurd, comical and poignant ways. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in Lunate, The Phare, Lucy Writers Platform and Popshot Quarterly. She is married with two children and a cat and is completing her first novel.
Feature image: Photo by Krišjānis Kazaks on Unsplash
