Louise Mather

gauze

Tear ducts ripped
to a questionnaire.
Hours in grey edges,
how misery strangles June
or symptoms of coldness,
awake in gauze, splinters
of metal, pressured
open like flowers
in a face or a mask.
Melancholy swallows rain,
dewy tongues,
slick with tunnels.
A moth may re-enact
its own violence
in echolalia to the moon.
The place between a body,
world, world, world.

dacrylagnia

Used as in face in physics,
quietly over the sink.

Love or tears, the act
of a witness.

Press everything into the mirror,
simply as a rose on a page.

Stand on the reflection or
I have collapsed in a way

you watch with envy, lips
red, like a gift.

Louise Mather is a writer from Northern England and editor of Acropolis Journal. A finalist in the Streetcake Poetry Prize, her work is published in The North, Broken Sleep Books, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Acumen and Dust Poetry Magazine. Her debut pamphlet ‘The Dredging of Rituals’ was published in 2021. Twitter: @lm2020uk IG: louise.mather.uk

Louise wrote the following about her poems:

In these poems I was interested to reflect on societal attitudes and experiences in social, work, educational and medical settings, particularly inspired after reading ‘The Crying Book’ by Heather Christle. Crying in public is often associated with an inability to cope, yet perhaps this lack of coping is often in the witness, how this judgement and negativity can impact led me down the rabbit hole, resulting in the poems ‘Gauze’ and ‘Dacrylagnia’ — a beautiful word given to the eroticism of crying. In this poem I imagine it as a gift to somebody who cannot cry themselves, a kind of transference or symbiosis; a celebration of that ugly red-faced apocalyptic sobbing perhaps the world could not only understand a little more but openly embrace.