Zelda Cahill-Patten
Zelda Cahill-Patten is a university student from London. Her work has appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears and student journals. In 2021 she was awarded the Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize for her sonnet ‘Pelias’, and in 2022 she was awarded the Gertrude Hartley Poetry Prize.
Turner
Mother turned to violence.
Needle, peeler, knife.
Stitches, iodine
and scalding pots:
I watched her tortuous
embroidery on silk,
her wringing
of the necks
of towels, how she
disembowelled
Mother Earth
on Sunday mornings
with a garden trowel.
She wouldn’t leave
my wet mess of a leg
alone (I’d fallen
from a bicycle,
my skin’s damp shreds
anarchic).
She was always there
with rubbing alcohol,
extracting tears.
Never could she
let my bruises be —
your pretty purpled knee
looks like a sunset,
he’d have said.
Turneresque and sticky.
Scalpel-love
In hospitals so bright so clean
the patients’ bodies pass between
the nurse and surgeon
like a shared cigar,
in scalpel-rape, and scar.
I give my body
to the surgeon,
trust him like a child.
I ask:
Why do you wear
your surgeon’s gown,
your gown of virgin-Mary blue?
“I’m going to
a stitcher’s ball.”
Dancer, my body
yields to you.
He’s tender-gloved,
confining me to bed
as would a father.
And so I lie in bed for days,
abide his tyrant’s order.
