In this room
we watched you rewind your mind
and get lost on the return journey.
Clothes unstitched their shape,
and we dropped like buttons
from an unravelled yarn of you.
Soon, your whole room wandered away;
in its clearing, we were dolls
embroidered with loose threads
of undone clothes. You snatched
our arms, dragged us along
with the vigour of a dream
losing its way into another dream,
routes so wrong in their direction,
but you so happy to show us.
Ryan Norman is a poet writing in Norwich. He studied at the University of Manchester and the University of East Anglia, has been published in Black Bough, the Poetry School Mixed Borders Pamphlet, the Cadaverine and the Mancunion. He was poet-in-residence in St. George’s Gardens in London in 2017.