House Share
Mice make themselves as thin as envelopes to fit under your doors. I am amused, until a mother mouse drags her deformed infant to the middle of the room. Bald, rosy, twitching on the floor. I stop next-door’s cat from hooking it away. How small should creatures be to die ignored? What is the cut-off point in size? I’d like to know if there’s no need to cry. That dormitory of ladybirds who sleep behind the blinds, dream on. False widow spiders tweak their sheets of silk. A white wave moth flickers on the sill. You have the strangest definition of living by yourself.
Anna-May Laugher is a prize winning poet. Her work has been widely anthologised. Titles include Poetry and all that Jazz, Three Drops from a Cauldron and Sophie Hannah’s The Poetry of Sex. Online her poems have been featured on Amaryllis; And Other Poems; and Ink, Sweat and Tears. She has written for the Reading Museum Project ‘A Sense of Place’ and for ‘From Palette to Pen’ for the Holburne Museum in Bath. Her first pamphlet is published by new press Luminous Road.