Sunday, Aberdeen
Waking from our final raucous night,
there are seagulls, the aftermath of gin, sharp
shafts of light scraping across the floor
and here I am, shipwrecked,
strand-strewn, flotsam
sicked up from the seabed.
Queasily the waves heave, hurling
over Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday; Thursday
I practise my scales, narrowing
the vowels at the passagio.
Songs freeze at forty below.
Friday, Saturday, I buy
the rain hat I was looking for;
it flops like a wet cod fillet.
At five, the North Sea weeps gold;
what remains is granite, the blues
and, silver-cold, the Sunday horizon –
A chinese-malaysian living in London, L Kiew earns her living as an accountant. She has completed a part-time MSc in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Edinburgh University and had poems published recently in Butcher’s Dog, Obsessed with Pipework, and Tears in the Fence.