Blossom
Kim Cullen
I.
Mammy sends me photos of magnolias
pink veins trickling through rosy flesh
casting shadows onto the brick walls,
in the evening light each one a different hue
dyed orange in the suns setting,
they greet her after a long day’s work.
I call mum, crying, she says the magnolia
has one week a year where it puts on a show,
the rest, it stands a little crumply at the edge of spring.
She sends me a photo of it every day that week—
if everything is shit there, just come home.
II.
Dad will be drinking espresso from a coffee mug,
dyeing his teeth and tongue brown, his breath
smelling like fatherhood; sleep and coffee beans
while he’d explain art and supermarket psychology –
everything there looks a little like an Andy Warhol picture.
The white washing blows in the breeze, bleaching
in the fresh heat of April. Maybe it’s the night
he will have his cigar of the year, vanilla flavored,
and like a child I might creep onto the terrace,
worried he’ll send me back to bed, ask him questions
about the world, certain he knows the answers to them all.
III.
It’s the first easter I haven’t come home,
welcoming silent tears on the way to Brotherton,
I pass a magnolia tree. I google flights
every night when I can’t sleep, realizing
I am a sum I can’t afford and at least 12 hours away.
Now, its week has passed and Brotherton’s magnolia
is shedding its petals that rest like a pillowed sea
under its arching branches. I can’t sleep in this city,
crave to hold the branch of mum’s magnolia
and breathe its air, pluck its petals from the crown,
pickle them for dinner.
IV.
They warn me the day will come when they’re too old
to sweep the leaves or hang the washing on the chord outside
between the treehouse they built us, and the quince tree,
too tired to mow the lawn and replace the orange bricks
as they crumble, or the wooden beams that part the bricks and
hold this place up – have held it for four-hundred years, being eaten
by woodworm. And then, the day will come, where I’m
the old lady who knocked on our door and told us she grew up here,
and she’d like to visit
just once more.
Kim Cullen
Kim Cullen's writing is often autobiographical, exploring the self and memory predominantly through childhood experiences. Born in Germany to an English artist Father and a German Mother, her poetry discusses borders, identity, and belonging through the lens of dual nationality and bilingualism. She writes to engage with home and family, and to translate sensations of letting go of people and places she loves. Through this, Kim finds new spaces of belonging – new beginnings. Her poetry has previously been published in Poetry and Audience and Tenter Hook, the latter of which she has also been a contributing editor to. She is currently in her third year at the University of Leeds, where the student newspaper The Gryphon has published her reviews of poetry events and art exhibitions. She is involved with the local More Song poetry event group, helping organise upcoming events, and will be volunteering for Bradford Literature Festival 2025.