Dirty Laundry

Pull up a seat, turn the page and tune into this taut shock opera, a domestic and emotional helter-skelter, where Fiona Sinclair raises the curtain in the form of unwanted amorous advances towards a recently widowed mother, who in turn takes centre stage. In a brick bungalow events uncoil, augmented by the shady lodger; indeed, no punches are pulled regarding mother’s affairs to supplement her need for drink. Among memorable imagery, such as ‘wardrobes hemmed her in like bouncers’ and ‘an absurd loyalty to Mateus Rose’, lurks a portent of the shape of things to come. Besides the botched suicide attempt, the religious adherence to preserving looks and this bordello-style existence, grows daughter, whose present reflection amounts to no more than a catalogue of harrowing days. Yes, it’s where gallows humour meets with the grotesque. Coronation Street, this ain’t.

How to Milk a Snake

Years before, brother-in-law with his catalogue model looks,
had slid from behind a tree into grandmother’s heart.

When mother was widowed, he was sent down
to tackle the garden that had become a wasted Eden.

One night, during his coffee break, sudden and unexpected
as exposing himself, he declared his lust for her;

she understood then why her husband had always refused
to take food from a plate that he had touched. It was not

just because he gossiped about friends with a schoolgirl’s
viciousness, and stormed off the pitch when he was bowled out;

she knew, too, that her face would be blamed for enticing him
away from grandmother and sister. So every evening,

standing with the width of the kitchen floor between them,
she was forced, for hours, to listen to his ruthless suit.

His glassy blue gaze would assault her as he worked himself
into an erection, at the prospect of ‘walking down the street

with a woman that everyone stared at.’ When he eventually left
she would scrub his mug and herself — twelve-year-old daughter

became a sullen bodyguard. Deadlock in the kitchen
as he censored his speech yet doggedly droned on.

She managed to deter him for months, till he detonated
the scandal, devastating as a dirty bomb, pitching

the family into civil war. The only solution to such incestuous
hatred was one complicit in her own exile to a town

thirty miles away. She briefly contemplated him as security,
but wanted to retch every time he tried to hold her hand.

Keeping him at phone’s length, when offering money,
she reasoned that he may as well pay for the nightly sex chat service.

Every Friday on the corner to the estate, daughter, now twenty, skulked
like a dealer for the £40 drop that supplemented their housekeeping.

He wooed her like this for years, simultaneously slandering her
for ‘stringing him along’, finally discovering singles nights and remarried.

She had met ‘the lodger’, a man who demanded more for his money.

Bio: Fiona Sinclair has written poetry, albeit sporadically, since her early 20s, and in her 30’s, after a series of indifferent jobs, found a new lease of life in studying Literature at Kent University. She then taught English at secondary level, though ill health has forced her to retire and return to crafting poetry. She lives in a village in Kent and is custodian of her late grandmother’s home, feeling a sense of disapproval whenever she neglects the garden or house work. This house, and her decadent collection of designer handbags, are the loves of her life.

http://www.fionasinclairpoetry.com/