Helen Kay

1900: John Barlas (poet) considers his Nurse at Gartnavel Asylum

‘I saw a golden flower and called it hope’
                                    J. E. Barlas, Bird Notes

Her phossy jaw commands turn me 
   to ash. Those matchstick lips burn 
mine to a bent smile that crumbles. 
   She brings me pills in chimney pots.

And yet she is divine. Dead-headed 
   flowers decay in me; my father, mother, 
child, all in the earth; she presses 
   a coal to my lips to taste her healing fire.        

These blankets are soft poems I can 
   crawl inside to forget this tawdry body 
and the hell-hot voices which goad me
    not to trust, to shout unclean thoughts.     

I have stashed the warm words of Oxford 
   quads. We decked our rooms with lilies;
debated crimson drapes and gilded plans. 
   Some days nightingales sing in my cell. 

I declare only my genius, my genes, 
   my generous ways. Oh, seraphim nurse, 
beautiful white bell, come bottle up 
   my angry half and sell it to the wasps.

Helen Kay’s poems crop up in various magazines. In 2018-2019 she was second in the Leeds Peace and the Welshpool Festival competitions. She curates a project to support dyslexic poets: Dyslexia and Poetry. Her pamphlet, This Lexia & Other Languages was published by v. press in July 2020.