OLIVIA RANSOME 

She lies motionless –

Nails lined with ragged fools-gold teeth

clutch drowned bottles to her breast,

stained, cheap, heavy –

the madonna of some clear godless child

who reigns regent behind her blown-bulb eyes,

scoured alike of cold reason

and the passion of madness.

Plastic carrier bags and hideous

coughing faces caper, gyrate

inside wrists and black boxes rammed

with scarlet wires.

Rotted cardboard and the newspaper from

twenty-third March,

crumbling wine-stoppers for her cage

of plaster and pitted glass,

lower soaked eyelids

as the black noise of two

telephones and the cracking of her

lifeless joints

spill out, saturated with warm breath

Olivia Ransome is a first-year English undergraduate at Mansfield College, Oxford. Her interests in poetry are part of a wider interdisciplinary practice, focusing on composition and visual art. Recent ventures include poetry written around Jorge Luis Borges' Fictions, part of a multimedia installation on the same theme, and transcriptions of Michael Field's poems for chamber trio.