Red Ribbon

In my earliest memory

I am five years old, peering through the living room window

at a removal van

pulled up next door.

Two girls with red-ribboned pigtails

three boys tall and lanky

a father with a wide smile

a mother with a long plait and rounded belly

unloading boxes

carrying lamps and statues and mismatched chairs.

My grandmother frowns over my shoulder

mutters to my father

about the area going downhill.

We know,

although they never say so;

it’s the ornaments they display in windows

their five-times-handed-down dungarees

the hardened edges to their syllables

the names I’ve never heard:

Siobhan

Fergal

Dympna.

The children go to a different school,

play different games in the street.

I’m not allowed to join.

I watch silently from my living room window

my own red ribbons trailing the top of the settee

as I wonder what the rules are

to the game I don’t understand.

One day I come home from school to find their car black and smoky

their window frames jagged

rooms empty

one light still on upstairs

smoke wisping out of the chimney

the air fume-dizzy

one ratty red ribbon

strewn across the step;

the area

going

downhill.

My own red ribbon

burns my neck

like fire.

From the Desk of the Poet:

At the moment I'm focusing on preparing my first collection for publication. It's called Troublemaker, and is about all the topics we're meant to avoid in polite conversation (politics, religion, grief, mental health) and how speaking about those topics has become so important to me, even if that causes trouble. I grew up in Northern Ireland and a few of my poems, including Red Ribbon, focus on the Troubles there. I'm just back from a trip back home to Belfast and feel like I have so much writing left to do on this subject - there is so much to say about war and home and migration and peace. 

Laura Van Vorst grew up in Northern Ireland and now lives in Sydney, Australia, on Dharawal land, where she is a poet, songwriter and psychologist. She has previously been published in Sad Girl Diaries and Cothumos, has recently had five pieces selected for an upcoming anthology on grief from Quillkeepers Press, and has her first full-length collection forthcoming later this year with Ginninderra Press. You can find more of her poetry on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok @Poems.by.Laura