Two Poems by Claire Crowther

Outside Holy Souls

Odd gloves, cartoon dolls, buttons, plastic flowers are all over
tops of walls, ladder-rungs, ditches, gutters or café tables
shiny with rain pools
from yesterday.

A losable woman cuts a sandwich, her arm, a neighbour.
She knows she’s not alone. But no one is finding her red coat,
check trousers, hide bag
full of receipts,

cigarettes. No one is looking for her outside the church now.
It’s confession time. The traffic is revving against the kerbs,
pedestrians jump
back and across;

she whispers to them about friends here at Holy Souls – ‘They know
me well,’ she says. ‘They are lost but they will be waiting for me.
More of them,’ she says,
‘than living friends.’

‘Spend it on food.’ Sock, shoe, kicked off, shrink and shiver in winter.
Confessed souls stroll out of church silence. They have genuflected
and crossed themselves, for-
given something.

A Jar

In the dark back kitchen —
my daughter curled in me kicking, my partner gone
for an unspecified
time, perhaps endless — I thought: I have no art.

I have a pickle jar,
once packed with sauerkraut, white cabbage, turmeric,
gun-metal peppercorns,
now propping up dead daisies. I binned them, swilled

and dried the glass and went
next door where I traded babysits for brushes
and half-used paints. I stained
the hard belly with blue snakes thrusting tongues round

my full-breasted planet.
They hiss on the outside.

Claire Crowther (www.clairecrowther.co.uk) has published five collections with Shearsman. Stretch of Closures was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Prize and Solar Cruise is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is Deputy Editor of Long Poem Magazine and teaches creative writing at Oxford University. Her New and Selected Poems is due during 2024.