Hollow
When they ask how my school days were
I say I didn’t talk much
You know the snail that shrinks back when approached

Because in the canteen during my first week
The popular girl loudly asks

Why does everyone hate Tamiko?

I struggle to leave the shell
among the echoes of why does everyone

Invitation
you say I should go along with it
get it out of your system

how do I explain:
I want to get so close
it might burn me
without walking into the fire

turn my life to ashes

Forged
My signature hasn’t changed
since they taught us what it was
in my first year at school.

Something that was only mine,
that I would use to agree to things.
Something that resembled my name, but only I could write it.
Half a drawing, half a scribble, half my name.
How could that be?

I’d seen my dad write out numerous cheques
For my piano lessons, using his signature.
I loved the clack-clack of the machine as it glided over
At departments stores or supermarkets.
It sounded good.
So did the slow rip of the paper as it tore from the chequebook
at home.
My dad would purse his lips as he wrote left-handed
in a tiny scrawl on the miniscule page that remained.
14.3.97. Piano lessons Term 3. £850.

Left-handed because he fell off a wall
on his first day of school, and with his right hand in a cast
he learned to write with the other.
A tumble that changed how he’d live the rest of his life.

When I asked him about signatures after school that day
he showed me his again.
Of course I copied it
because how could something that needed to be a reflection of me
not be partly his too?
We imitate what we adore.

I created a signature that mirrored his so closely
that every time I write it now – redundant mostly
as I swipe my watch or phone
or at a stretch four digits on a card if the contactless doesn’t work
I think of how he taught me to sign my name
how I’ve hidden him in there
so if anyone wants to see who I am
they’ll find him too.

<belonging

Tamiko read Latin and French at New College, Oxford and was the winner of the BBC Radio 3 carol competition 2021. She’s usually found writing a poem about you, so don’t tell her anything.

X @tamiko_dooley
Instagram @dooleytamiko

Of the poems featured here, Tamiko says:

‘Hollow is about how the transition into a bigger environment at secondary school can make it a struggle to work out where, and whether, we belong. Invitation is about how during teenage years where we straddle childhood and adulthood, it can be easy to be pressured into activities in order to feel that we belong. Forged is about how Children often want to belong in the grown-up world - part of this for me was copying my dad’s signature, to try to be more like him.’

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