Poetry

John Upton: Two Poems

Doorways   Counting my blood, I click, puncture a waiting finger dialling triglycerides.   Blood is a ruby doorway, my parents stripped of years, my father with a cocky slightly tongue-protruding one-handed roll-your-own, my mother at the copper on Monday morning, heaving with a wooden pot stick sheets into concrete tubs.   In the doorway she’s folded over, her hands holding her body, while my frightened father runs next door to phone. She murmured to him, “I’ve lost it”. On the bedsheets, blood.   The taxi stops. My mother home from hospital. Her open arms. The heart leaping in the…

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