THE COTTAGE
We don’t remember how we came back to it each night the attic door opening its corner of black as dark as the charcoal that surrounds the moon that stiffened itself into the sheets through a curtain-less window scuffled with leaves we emptied more & more wine into the nights your son slept as the walls inched closer inhaled the innocent down on his neck the shape of the memory cut with kid’s scissors we tore off our sand-gritted shirts back-to-back in bed we shivered under covers waiting for the cottage to wake itself into whatever memory it couldn’t swallow this ceremony of us both tensing our nerves to bulb-hot glass the slow percussion of horror starting to tremble & shake the chairs the thick floorboards wept the roof dreamt its only dream of the weight of rain as the noise broke closer to split the dust at the foot of our bed our heart-punched chests as we held face to face eyes shut & waited
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THE FISH-BOWL IN THE WAITING ROOM
The girl in the cherry dress taps the glass streaming her fingers over the bowl’s flashes of colour like paint-tubes forcing purple & yellow as the nurse calls the numbers of the waiting who look at their hands full of beautiful red blood & I’m the only one thinking that each Barb or Cory is a clot second-scan or tumour God has paired us with how he loves to remind us in the morning cough we catch late in our hands we push it to the back but it remains staring through the brown- flecked water pooled in shadow the ever- hungry O of the Lord
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DANIEL SLUMAN‘s poems have appeared in journals such as Cadaverine, Popshot, Shit Creek Review and Under the Radar. He serves on the editorial board of Fit To Work: Poets against Atos and is Creative Writing editor for the academic journal HARTS & Minds. His debut full-length collection, Absence has a weight of its own, was published in 2012, through Nine Arches Press. He tweets @danielsluman
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Read more work by Daniel Sluman:
Three more poems by Daniel Sluman in B O D Y
Poem at Fit to Work: Poets Against Atos
Two poems at Wordgathering