Poem by Charlotte Oliver :The Cleaning of my Heart

The Cleaning of My Heart

A big suction slurp and a pop as her bran tub-reach retrieves 
my memory of tutu dolly lying on the aubretia – 
pink&green&purple – such beauty only paralleled to 
my kitten self by mum, hair tonged and eyes shadowed blue. A 
quick wipe over, she stuffs it back down to the bottom, and blind 
fingers stumble on, sliding  over and through decades of me 
heaped on top of each other like a bucket of shells. She 
pulls out shapes and colours, some unrecognisable for a 
moment, others accessed more recently – the temperature 
of grandpa’s hands, the clatter of the button tin, loneliness. 
Some have fused from long association so she 
handles them more carefully, others are just crumbs – microscopic 
starbursts filling dark spaces between – which she gathers up 
in a metal tray and empties straight back in. I am surprised 
by how many pairs of shoes have found their way inside it, a 
structure I surely should reserve for things that matter more, warm 
shame as I remember there are shoes I have loved more than 
some people but after a good polish, they sit back in 
more comfortably. She lays a lot of what she finds out on the lawn, 
so many neat rows of reasons for who I am that after a 
while I am giddy and light, an empty plastic bag 
waltzing with the wind through an endless sky.When she has cleaned 
and replaced everything, I realise that there is room for more. 


Bio: Charlotte Oliver is a writer who lives in Scarborough, Yorkshire. She was the commissioned poet for BBC Radio York’s Make a Difference campaign and her work have been published widely. She has poems upcoming in Cape Magazine’s Bitches Get Stuff Done, Green Teeth’s Yorkshire Anthology, Black Bough’s Winter edition and Ice Floe’s Pandemic Love Anthology.
She tweets at @charlotteolivr

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