Introducing ‘Wedding Underwear for Mermaids’ by Linda Ann Strang

Honest Publishing is delighted to announce its latest publication, ‘Wedding Underwear for Mermaids’ by Linda Ann Strang. Arresting, intuitive and a little bit fishy, it’s a collection of poetry we’re proud to give a home to, and hope you’ll feel the same. Here’s a taster of what’s to come…

Unmanned by Mothers’ Day

There’s nothing less feminine than motherhood.
I’m a muscular bitch hauling children, heavy
as sacks full of filthy toweling and howling onions,
to the beds they’d rather avoid.

Though once I saw an empty tampon packet,
lying in the street, that the rain had filled
with blue gum flowers and autumn oak leaves,
and even they looked like a fistful of viscera.

I hold the kids down when the dentist is hysterical,
enforce a regimen of book reading and butternuts,
stare down death when fevers laugh at paracetamol,
wage guerilla warfare against God for our survival.

No flowers, fluffy slippers, and ribbons – it’s blood
and pain, vomit on my breasts, and piss.
I come in with my rifle and my shrunken heads –
gory, shell-shocked, scarred –

they hand me a gift tea cup and a pink greeting card.

‘Wedding Underwear for Mermaids’ is due to land early 2011.