Judith Luongo
At the Foundling Museum
They told me
to leave a token,
when I left
my child,
so that, thereafter,
should my circumstance
improve,
I may reclaim
my daughter.
On record,
she’d be a brooch
or ribbon, button,
ticket, coin – the latter
best engraved.
By this way only
she’ll be
known as mine.
She is to be renamed.
And if I own
no single thing,
to tear a swatch
of clothing, divide,
retain one half
to match the other,
so I may prove
she is the one
I left behind.
They said,
hold tight this fragment of your love.
Alison Lock writes poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction – the author of seven publications, as well as contributor to several anthologies. Her writing has won/been listed in a number of competitions: The London Magazine, The Sentinel Literary Quarterly, The Tillie Olsen Award, The Carve Esoteric Prize. Her work focuses on the relationship of humans and the environment, connecting an inner world with an exploration of land and sea, a love of nature, through poetry and prose. Her recent publication Lure by Calder Valley Poetry is an account of a traumatic accident and subsequent recovery – a poetic sequence of personal transformation. www.alisonlock.com.
Judith Luongo has spent many years searching for clues about how we manage to keep evolving and surviving as imperfect, conflict ridden beings. Her art is informed by her practice as a Creative Arts Therapist and Psychoanalyst as well as by her many years of teaching Creative Arts Therapists. Judith’s work has moved through a period devoted to dreamy landscapes to character studies through portraiture and the figure. For the past five years she has been passionate about an abstract expressionist approach as she seeks to deepen her inquiry into the palpable presence of that which is unspoken and unspeakable. Her work has been shown at Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition; Pratt Institute; and Michael David & Co.