Good Friday

The air is suddenly sweet-smoked and humming,
and I’m back in the incense-wreathed
Lanes of 90s Brighton, perfecting the art
of flicking through CDs in second-hand stores,
the thrill of buying tarot cards
that I’ll hide when I get home.
And I’m on the seafront with my friends,

drawing biro hearts on our skinny wrists;
we split a bag of chips five ways
and I map out how to live my life
so I’m never some bloke’s missus.
And while the century turns like the tide,
the girl I love says she loves me too. She slips
her velvet blazer round my shoulders and we watch

the waves come in, and in –
we nearly miss the last train back
because we’re drowning in some new kind of happiness
it seems we’ve just invented.
The air is suddenly sweet-smoked and humming.
I find myself crying for that girl, who became my wife,
and died at thirty-three, like Christ.

IVF

They measure my endometrium in sacred millimetres,
track the beads of swelling follicles with the precision
of praying the rosary. The injection site smarts
on my fistful of flesh, bee-sting wound crouching
in supplication at the base of a question mark.

Life is now lived in cycles of two-week waits; the TWW,
as I type online to other hopeful women. We send
each other baby dust, keep fingers crossed for sticky beans.
We all share the fear there’ll be blood on the paper
each time we take a piss.

I marvel at the chosen ones, posting their pictures
of those holy two blue lines on a test: the trim on the hem
of a saint’s robes, protruding feet we kissed in tandem.
We were novice rivals vying for a single place all along;
I kneel once more on the bathroom floor and bleed.

Catherine Redford lives in the West Midlands. She started writing poetry after being widowed at the age of 35. She has poems published in Under the Radar, The Storms, New Welsh Reader, Propel, Lighthouse, Ink Sweat & Tears, Atrium, and Alchemy Spoon. She is an editor at Dust Poetry Magazine and a member of the Emma Press Birmingham Editorial Readers Group. She was longlisted in the 2023 Nine Arches Press Primers competition. She has also published widely on Romantic and Victorian literature, with a particular focus on post-apocalyptic texts and the Gothic. Twitter/X: @C_Redford_ Instagram: catherine__redford