A little poem from my new pamphlet, The Undoing, with a playful sketch by me! Details are given in my previous post. The pamphlet is available from Maytree Press.
The lipstick imagery comes from childhood. As a little girl in the fifties and sixties the plasticky painted lips of women fascinated me. Why did they do it? Why paint your mouth? Surely it was an inconvenience, a burden? A woman would not leave her house without painting on the waxy deep-red (later more adventurous pink and apricot) pigment from the clever twisty-uppy tube, often decorated with gold and attractively shiny, especially to an inquisitive small girl… It seemed at odds with the dull lives of housewives and women teachers. It was a liablility, leaving behind the print of their mouths on tea cups and glasses, Hard to wash off. It seemed that they left their words behind, gossiping away. A tell-tale splotch on a stained tea-cup. It is am image that has cropped up in my short stories, particularly one you can read within this blog – The Rhododendron Canopy.
Elizabeth Stott - to Blog or Not 