by Judith Luongo
Sonnet
I was ten days late to meet you that spring. I was your
first, and you named me life. I think of you often,
laughing in the velvet skirt, balancing umbrella plants
on your bike handles, twenty, sunburnt, hair to your
waist. I got you an umbrella plant last Christmas.
I inherited your velvet skirt, your copy of Brideshead.
We don’t look alike but we eat the same way,
stomachs churning butter into guilt. You sprinkled sugar
on my Weetabix when I was nine, you cut my hair. I want
to know if you cry like me: infantile, gulping, loud.
I’m late; I see you through the window, angel with
a mint tea and a flapjack you’re ready to regret. In a second,
you’ll look up and see me smile. You began me
in August; funny, then, how we both hate the summer.
Eva Townsend Bilton is a writer, an editor at Doghouse Press, and currently a student of English and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University. She is based in Southampton, England and can be found on Twitter @cloudy_appple.
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.