Lucy Duggan

first words

my mother kept marmalade under her hat
she said: boil the whole fruit
she wouldn’t tell me how to grow it

i wanted stories from her mouth
she swallowed juice gulped pulp

i made these cold preserves from glass

i asked her to tell me where she came from
she said they should be knobbly, bitter
should be full of pips
she said: i’ve always been here

but isn’t every mother other
from another place
a place which sees fit
knows best
cuts peel
pith and all
sweet film
of a child biting into a lemon
first time face scrunched up

i clung on like a green orange
i’ve seen myself unripe in old pictures
i don’t know when i fell out of her arms

later, maybe, in the future,
i’ll understand the amber
beads of stories
cheap but dear
kept in her mouth
not to be sold

wasn’t she once
foreign and small

wasn’t she once
a tiny fruit
i swallowed whole

Lucy Duggan is a writer and translator based in rural Brandenburg, in eastern Germany. She is the author of Tendrils (Cambridge: Peer Press, 2014), a novel about long-lost enemies. Her work has appeared in The Catweazle Magazine, The Spectacle, and The Washington Square Review.