We’re pleased to announce the winner of the April WWWC: Mike Ladd. Mike’s response to the prompt ‘turning a corner’ is short in length, but not on emotion. An impossible sighting makes Mike question reality and confront his grief.
Read his winning entry, ‘Not Turning a Corner’ below. This is Mike’s third WWWC win – find his winning response to ‘glimmer of light’ here, and ‘funny thing happened the other day’ here.
Not Turning a Corner
Two days after identifying my mother in her coffin, I saw her standing on the corner of Brighton Parade and Clarence Avenue. She was slowly turning in a circle like someone searching for her way home. The figure I saw standing there was her height, had her hair and her face. I was driving up Brighton Parade and I knew it couldn’t be her because I had been by her side in the hospital when she was taking her last breaths. And I had seen her lying still in her coffin at the funeral home. And I had signed her death certificate. Yet there she was. But I kept driving because I knew it couldn’t be her. Why didn’t I swerve the car into Clarence Avenue and get out? Why didn’t I approach her and guide her back to her old home which was just one street away, or if it turned out differently, be brave enough to witness her vanish into the air before my eyes? Why was I so rational? Because I had seen her. Yet I refused to believe it, or rather was paralysed into non-action, later making excuses that it must’ve been an old woman who looked very similar. But now that some time has passed, I believe it was her, or a powerful hallucination of her, projected from my own mind. I had just come from her empty house, spending an hour or two sorting through papers and securing the will and had not seen her there, no sign of actual presence, as opposed to visual memories. But here she was, randomly, on a street corner, staring as if trying to peer into a fog or through a ripple-glass door, searching and lost. I’m haunted now by the thought that she didn’t know where to go even though she was so close to home and that … and that I didn’t stop to help her. Stupid idea. Irrational. Foolish. But that is what happened.
At the age of seventeen, Mike Ladd began reading his poetry at Adelaide’s renowned Friendly Street and his poems started appearing in local and national publications. His first book The Crack in the Crib was published in 1984 followed by eight collections of poetry and prose. Mike was the editor of ABC Radio National’s highly respected Poetica, which ran for eighteen years. He currently works for Radio National’s features and documentary unit, and he and his partner Cathy Brooks have been running projects that put poems on street signs as public art. Mike is a poetry mentor, judge, and also a reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald. Over the past two decades he has given poetry workshops and masterclasses in every state and territory of Australia.
Mike’s latest book is Dream Tetras, co-authored with Cathy Brooks.