Arvon day exercise - led by Kit de Waal and Lisa Blower
Theme: Location, zooming-in camera lens, stimulated by photograph of terraced houses
Spring, summer, autumn and winter do not factor. It is the season of childhood, seamless as healed stitches and sedate as boiled milk. As you peel back the clammy skin clinging to the liquid and peer into the mug, you will see the sky of Deercote, Hollinswood — faintly white with the mild shock of sprained ankles on skateboards, tinctured grey with the grave myth of the murder in the corner flat.
The kerbs are hospitable to frantic scooter wheels and the worn, eighties tarmac of the road makes for an unpredictable Beyblades ramp. My mother peers out from the curtain nets patinated with the deathly splats of bluebottles; my father is comprised of impatience reserved only for insects, for which karma disfigures his tattoos in their splayed, smudge-blooded image. On his bicep, tigers morph into teal ghosts from Scooby Doo.
Six, seven, ten, eleven — it does not factor. It is the age of dying grandparents and the drive is an inviting void for bubble writing in appropriately transient chalk. I skip and wrestle my brother. Every fight is fair in this street rendered androgynous by the shaggy, shoulder-length hair of its ignorant happy children, playing out.
M. J. Severn
2022
Comments