Clementine Lussiana

Play-date

Come on in.
Bauble-bright sweet wrappers and the millennium’s newspapers,
Palatial. Tea-party, gin in cups and saucers, add some lime,
a sugar cube, drink up. She smiles with her gums,
white hair wisped prettily to show off marbled temples.

How about a game of cards?
She says she’ll be Queen of hearts, but wait.
That’s not how it works, is it?
Alright, dolls then. Get bored of all the looking after though.

Out comes the dress up box, she coos giddy.
We find nappies, nighties, negligée.
Plunge into pinstripes. Suit up, strut around,
city boys, total studs. She dies laughing, ruins it. I find a wedding veil,
wrap it round me, makeshift maxi skirt. We hold hands and whirl, fast, faster,
A twosome in transgenerational technicolour.

She’s dizzy before I am. We crumple onto cracker fillers and coke cans.
Put straws in our mouth, puffing away. She curls in, conspiratorial.
Tells that sometimes she thinks she still bleeds, lunar-like.
Thinks that the old dog still barks in the morning.

Clementine Lussiana grew up in Portugal, and read French and Italian at the University of Cambridge. She now works full time in publishing, and her poetry has featured in The Mays Anthology. 

Clementine wrote the following comment about her poem:

The idea for this poem came in the form of its opening line. I was interested in addressing head-on the role of a poem to exist as a space which the reader can be invited (or ordered) to enter and inhabit. I wanted to populate that space with a surreal landscape, experienced through the lens of an intergenerational friendship. Here, boundaries blur and distend as memory does; play can become sinister, and tragedy, joyful.