Heidi Williamson has had poems in magazines including The Rialto, Horizon Review, Smiths Knoll, Smoke, Orbis, Poetry News, Mslexia, South, Guardian online, Other Poetry, and others. She won the Poetry Can Competition 2009 and was a runner up in the Mslexia Poetry Competition in 2007 and 2008. In 2008-2009 she was poet-in-residence at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre, and received an Arts Council award to complete her first collection in 2008.
That hour I was the mast
as the future drew itself up around me.
I’d been told it wasn’t time,
but I flooded out on a half-hour tide —
berthed on this cot
submerged beneath glass walls,
not ready for air.
They cabled it to me like a diver.
My father kept watch.
My mother floated away
on exhaustion and drugs.
I gripped the plastic wrist tag like a flag.
I was barely afloat,
trying to remember how to right myself.
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited 