The temperature of blue
  
 I
 They told us, at school, the colour blue was cold.  
 We loaded up our big poster-paint brushes 
 with Prussian blue and painted sea, wondering 
 what Prussia had to do with it, and where 
 was Prussia anyway? We painted sky
 sky-blue, though it was nearly always grey.  
 We wore stiff navy tunics,  forget-me-not shirts 
 that didn’t keep us warm, which proved the point. 
  
 Now they say, blue is not always cold. 
 There are warm blues and cool ones. Closeness to violet, 
 nudging red, makes a blue warm. Think of
 northern summer nights, the sky a lucent ultramarine, 
 horizon tinged with late rose.
                                                  After all, 
 Homer’s wine-dark Mediterranean makes  sense.
  
  
 II
 At this sky-scorched café in the plaza  
 I sit and read your letter – on that damned  
 blue paper you’re so fond of. It’s your anger, 
 the blazing paraffin flares of it,
 that I can’t understand. You say you are 
 rejected. You say I’ve cast you off. 
 It’s cold out here, you write, as though you were 
 away on some exoplanet, not just in 
  
 another town, a little further north. 
 You say that I blow hot and cold, as though 
 fire and ice were not the way love is. 
 As though I were your Arctic. Frozen, burned, 
 I see now that I’ve never known what lies 
 beyond the icy shoreline of your eyes.  
  
 
  
 bask
  
 i watch you bask in me
 your eyes closed under my skies
             i am the dawn the firmament
             to you only a woman
             as far as you know
 your eyes closed you
 might miss the moment of gold
 metamorphosis
  
 we are two
 innocent alchemists playing
 with time in the sun
 making pots of sandcastle
 gold       you glow between my
 midas hands
             for now
 then when i’m resting in your arms
 my flower body refreshed
 calyx just a moment ago welcoming 
             spring
             for us both to drink at
 close your eyes again and
 we turn back into our
 selves of plain substances
             (but can you see how i am
             flecked with gold?) 
  
  
 
  
 At the dialysis unit

 that scarlet ribbon 
 winds from elbow bend
 down, around, pulsating as
 lifeblood makes its march
 to the outside and
             in again 
             and again
  
 this ritual, this
 arcane assemblage, these 
 machines of loving grace[1] 
 their smiling screens
 bland blue bodies
 low kindly hum
 that ceaselessly swallow, 
 digest, recycle blood, march it 
             onward and roundward
             onward and roundward
  
 we sit beside his bed
 talk quietly of family on holiday
 the ward’s acquaintances
 the surprise of spring snow
   
 but I can glance only sidelong 
 at the red life thread winding 
 from the elbow bend where 
 a portal of pleated flesh 
 has been made for it
 my eyes will not follow 
 the purifying journey 
 down and around
  
 look up, white
 swirls like a murmuration
 look down, red
 glides like a plainchant 
 down and around and between
 the stone columns of resistance, of
 hanging on 
 that will not let him die

 
 Confessional
  
 I
 Arms, throat wide, she shrieked
 in rageful fortissimo
 stamped, stomped, set the tempo
 wrists bent inward like broken wings
 conducted the performance
 flailingly, unfailingly
                                     delivering 
 the most intimate details to the room
 in earthquakes of joy, tsunamis of anger, 
 unquenchable, sizzling 
 acid reflux of disappointment 
 palpitating  howling  barking
 roll up roll up, see my heart
 bare, hear it 
                         scream
  
 And the room roared and whistled and yelled and clapped
 and clapped and clapped and CLAPPED and CLAPPED
  
 And the café walls cracked open and let in
 the night and the rain and the cars in the street
 and people fell off their chairs onto
 people sitting crosslegged on the floor
 and the coffee boiled and the cakes burst into flame
 and our ears bled 
 but not our hearts.
  
 II
 And then i remember
 a girl’s confession, whispered 
 through a grille in darkness 
 perfume of cedarwood, lattice 
 more Islamic than Roman
 memory of incense deep in the walls
 bless me, father, quia peccavi …
 and the Father’s voice, 
 a soporific tenor that had never left Cork 
 anchored on two notes, minor third falling
 ego te absolv-o         a peccatis tu-is –  
 was he really listening, or just singing to himself?
 My little sins so mundane
 swearing, scowling, ‘answering back’,
 being touched by a boy and liking it
 once
 the cedarwood grille was more exotic
 my performance never worth more than
 three Hail Marys and a Credo, dear, in nomine Patris, 
 et Fil-ii, et Spiritus Sancti, A-men.
 
 
 [1] From Richard Brautigan, ‘All watched over by machines of loving grace’ 

Mandy Macdonald is an Australian writer and musician living in Aberdeen, trying to make sense of the 21st and other centuries. She has been writing poetry for much of her life, clandestinely, but finally began letting other people see it after returning to poetry via Jo Bell’s path-breaking ‘52’ project.  Now it has been seen by readers of several anthologies and many online and print journals in the UK and further afield, most recently Vaster than Empires (an anthology about vegetables from Grey Hen Press, 2018) Multiverse (science fiction poetry from Shoreline of Infinity, 2018), and Noon (Solstice Shorts, Arachne, 2019), and journals including The Poets’ Republic, Marble, Words for the Wild, The Curlew, and Firth. When not writing, she makes music with Intuitive Music Aberdeen and a number of choirs. Her first collection will be published later in 2019.

Aberdeen’s cold, wild and beautiful North Sea coast is a far cry from the golden dunes and blue surf of Mandy’s Australian childhood, and she has also lived and worked in Cuba and Central America. All these places, and others, find a place in her poetry. She is appalled by climate change,  but poetry, music, and gardening keep her sane.