Mary by Lucy Whalen (England, 22)

​When I was a child,
I used to sing to the sky,
I never thought anyone was listening,
Or that somewhere up there,
Gabriel was

Leaning over too far
To hear, after too many beers,
Until he dropt
Face-first to the floor.

The pages they write
Will never tell of how I
Wiped cuts and scrapes
From your mass of shapes
Because it’s not a form
They understand.

​This isn’t a love story,
This is a girl, finding a reason
To walk through snow
So she can smile at an angel’s wings -
Just to feel something new
For a while.

This is the feeling you get
When the sun sets over a city
You’re not stopping at,
And the clouds blush pink

Over church spires.

This is sitting with friends
You won’t know by winter
On the grass under the church wall,
Dressed in a band shirt
With two cans of fruits
And a future that whispers from
Somewhere at the end of a prayer.

Lucy Whalen is a poet from Durham, England. She studied French Studies and English Literature at Lancaster University, the highlight of which was writing a 4,000-word essay on sexism in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Her poem Angel was recently published in Cake Magazine and her main inspirations are Carol Ann Duffy's Feminine Gospels and Elizabeth Train-Brown's Salmacis. ​