Maman, by Prue Chamberlayne

                                   
Maman

after Louise Bourgeois, Tate Modern 2007
                              
Inside the straddled legs, I’m catapulted back
against the fortress of my mother’s corset;
 
under the glass ball sac, on threadbare chair, 
her creature, safe from the reach of pouncing limbs 
 
that grab my siblings to bang heads. Mid shrieks 
I swallow horror, silence my inner scream,
 
and let betrayal, the habit of glancing past, 
embed as inner canker. Bound to escape ten heads
 
jammed in a family web, to vamp myself
I’ll turn to missile, fuelled by fission.

Prue Chamberlayne

​Prue Chamberlayne grew up by the river Severn and lives in London and the Aveyron in France. After feminist comparative social policy, biographic-interpretive research, and a rural project in Uganda, came poetry, with a collection Locks Rust in 2019, and a corona chapbook Beware the Truth that’s Manacled with erbacce-press in 2022, on the psychic underworld of racial experience, particularly regarding "whiteness." She has a ready a pamphlet Love’s Pendulum on inter-racial love and parenting. A forthcoming second collection is called Lizard Looks. Recent journal acceptances include Dawntreader, Green Ink Press, Galway Review, Wild Court. You might like https://poetrywales.co.uk/prue-chamberlayne-on-how-she-writes-a-poem/.