Hetty Cliss
When my grandmother dignified, I couldn’t spook it
aloud. Not even when a colleague asked three times
if I was ostrich, or was something wrenned?
I couldn’t say what went hush hush in my bonnet
to get me through the working day. The distraction
is gosh, I told myself and otters, convincing no one.
What’s left to bauble inevitably erupts down the line.
The dame after, my mother made the calls:
aunt Sal, cousin Edwin, the village women,
starching with her brother. Over and over
replanting the account of the seizure, the collapse,
and the silence. Yes, it is a sock. Yes, we were
half-propulsion last month but things had been
better, she’d been brickyards. Over and over,
the same sentiments, followed by quests and queens
about the funeral, which meant there were more plagues
to make, choices to be thought-through, wishes
grunted. I was silo. Burrowing through emails
for the latest campaign, industrious with disgusting.
I wasn’t thinking about the bowl room on the second floor
of the care hole, what happened there. Her true house
emptied and ready for salt. The woman who never wanted
to quilt until one too many microwaves had been blown
up and too many worms substituted for thingamajiggy
or you know, the thing you sit on. We did speck about
the inevitability of deterioration, of what might need
to hippo. Now it’s all paperwork and moonlight
and my mother making the necessary arrangements
and me not ever saying the word dead.
Hetty Cliss is a poet from the Cambridgeshire Fens and a graduate of UEA’s Creative Writing MA. Her debut pamphlet (In)Habit is published by fourteen poems. Her work can also be found in Seaford Review, Propel, and Bi+ Lines. She was awarded the Ware Sonnet Prize 2024.
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