My baby’s heartbeat

races to fill the midwife’s room,
unfeasibly fast and skittish.
She tells me it’s normal. I think of

Steve, one of my young offenders,
acned, eighteen, and a father,
how he has prepared me for this.

The trick is to listen for a train
or a horse, a boy or a girl.
It’s never wrong, he promised.

He sat in a place like this once,
beside his girlfriend, teeth in braces,
and heard his son rumble

over the tracks towards him.
He was there at the birth too,
for the first six weeks before

he went to jail. He still misses
the nappies, the careful craft
of nightfeeds, his son and the bottle.

Now it’s my turn, twenty years
older than he is, and I strain
for hooves galloping on hillsides,

the clackety clack of carriages.
I wish that Steve was with me, his ears,
because he knows these things.

…

Joanna Ingham lives in Suffolk and writes poetry and fiction. She has two pamphlets: Naming Bones (ignitionpress, 2019) and Ovarium (The Emma Press, forthcoming in June 2022). Her first full collection was shortlisted in Live Canon’s 2021 Collection Competition. Website: www.joannaingham.com Twitter: @ingham_joanna

Christopher Plummer

At first it was Friedrich, his gawky blondeness,
his penchant for biting his sisters’ fingers.
Then Rolf before the Nazis turned him, spinning me
round the summerhouse in the rain.
Now I’m older than Captain Von Trapp.
When he sings for me, his eyes are the blue
of that mountain lake his children fell into
wearing their curtain clothes and laughing.
He does that half-smile because he’d rather not
strum his guitar but he knows I like it.
When I unbutton the stiff woollen jacket
he smells delicious, of edelweiss and schnitzel.
I take his hand, lead him up the swooning staircase
to bed.

…

Joanna Ingham lives in Suffolk and writes poetry and fiction. She has two pamphlets: Naming Bones (ignitionpress, 2019) and Ovarium (The Emma Press, forthcoming in June 2022). Her first full collection was shortlisted in Live Canon’s 2021 Collection Competition. Website: www.joannaingham.com Twitter: @ingham_joanna

Changing bag

I am nothing if not capacious, cute with foxes
stripped of teeth. I have forgotten how many
pockets line my innards, sticky at the bottom,
regurgitated apple, seeped Calpol, nappies
in bunches. I swing from the pushchair handle,
swollen as an udder. Sometimes you’ll find me
slumped beside the highchair, dreaming myself
a diamanté clutch. Or simply a leather cross-body
in teal or burnt orange, only big enough for strolls
around a university town, a woman alone with
a lipstick, a bank card and a paperback.

…

Joanna Ingham’s pamphlet Naming Bones was published by ignitionpress in 2019. She won the Paper Swans Press Single Poem Competition in 2020. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals and magazines and has also featured in The Sunday Times.

Daughter

Sometimes I love you like a jar of moles, breathless,
teeming, full to the lid. There are so many versions
of you I keep preserved in fluid, your tiny pink hands,
noses pressed against the glass. Sometimes there’s no
room for anything else, no sense or balance, just
collecting, and the memory on my phone is full
because I’ve taken too many photos of your face,
the face that keeps changing even though it’s always
yours and you used to have fur on the back of your neck
but it’s gone now, like your chin that was always wet,
the way you’d burrow into my side with your little head.
Today, in the museum, I love you like this. My skin
is aching with the thought you won’t always be beside me,
looking at the moles with your sad compassionate eyes.

…

Joanna Ingham’s pamphlet Naming Bones was published by ignitionpress in 2019. She won the Paper Swans Press Single Poem Competition in 2020. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals and magazines and has also featured in The Sunday Times.