Stainless Sister
 
Aunt and chums over tea and cakes,
sifting through ancient snaps
admit my mother’s memory into childhood reminiscences,
the adult years not speaking skirted
like a giant turd.
 
Forty years ago our family’s Sunday Sport scandal:
    Brother-in-law leaves wife for sexy sister;
my mother beseeching innocence
to a slammed front door, smashed phone, shredded letters.
 
The sisters’ last Good Bye some twenty years later,
aunt skype-waving  from her front window at my mother,
in the clapped-out Ford, barely able to lift her cancer-corrupted head.
 
Since then photos of my mum handed to me as if scalding by aunt,
but at this previously unseen image of her sister,
a lanky legged child in black gabardine coat, beauty dormant,
 
aunt quietly - She could not have known then what would happen -
hurries away to peel potatoes for supper.

Fiona Sinclair