Funny Girl, by Helen Heery

Funny Girl, by Gary Hume (England) 1998. Used with permission of the artist and his studio.

Funny Girl

I am five shapes of flat-colour.
Make of them what you will –
eyes, mouth, a hand cupping 
one side of my face?
A Funny Girl perhaps, though 
I do not laugh. Or smile. 

If it is lips you see, they only tell
of a pale-pink heart pulled widthways 
and out of kilter. If it is eyes, they tell 
of two wrens at twilight, twittering 
to one another, that inner conversation 
I keep having with myself.

I started out much larger.
Now reduced to postcard size
and reproduced over and over,
I gatecrash households far and wide.
I crave the sun, my skin is ashen 
too long inside without natural light –

but the things I have seen behind 
closed doors, things I have heard 
from the darkness of drawers.
You know I know something
but secrets are secrets and none 
of them funny, so I’m saying nothing.

Helen Heery

Helen lives in Manchester and began writing poetry after taking early retirement. Her work has appeared in Orbis Literary Journal, Dream Catcher, Obsessed with Pipework and both The Ekphrastic Review and Reflex Fiction websites. Two of her poems were shortlisted in the Bridport Prize 2020 and she came 3rd in the Waitrose Year of Poetry  competition in 2014.

Read another ekphrastic poem by Helen Heery, here.


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