A Lounge Full of Dead Queens by Haley Jenkins

one by one they enter the front room, remove their shoes and take up in sofas and armchairs,

they shake off the shale, clinker and mudstone in their teeth.

Rowen. Sexburga. Boudica busy exploding out of her territory by farting over the biscuits,

her hare snoring loudly in the folds of her dress, dead-eyed and battle-ready.

Cartimandua. Bertha. Ethereldreda. Edburga. Judith. Egwyna busy kissing her belly for in a vision she beheld a prodigy, moonshine from her womb to England where now there is bad politics, daytime drama and debts children can never pay. 

my grandmothers are among them, Elfreda and Elvira, stewing in my grief-language 
written across all our breasts
theirs wrinkled by baby mouths, men’s tongues, cobblestone kitchens and slate fingers

all queendoms ball-chained with spears, milkbottles and something we call ‘love’

head in hands, I disappear into the blue and my shatterlines, my mad-sanity salting 

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Haley Jenkins was award with a Creative Writing MA from The University of Surrey and a Creative Writing BA from The University of Roehampton. She runs Selcouth Station Press and her poetry book Nekorb was published by Veer Books in 2017. She has been published in Persona Non Grata (Fly on the Wall Press), Plaster Cocktail Issue 1, Guttural Magazine, In Which Dragons Are Real But (Fincham Press), plus other digital and print publications.