Judy Dench watches over
When a guard dog barks you start to think about the dark. How very dark.
Curtains flap in the wake of a ceiling fan that creaks. How much had to happen before this began to happen? Eat all the sugar so the vermin don’t try to come in. Clean plastic containers are a godsend, I swear.
The WiFi is reassuring, French films are reassuring, chocolate from the fridge wet on hot hands, hot lips. Knowing it is mid-afternoon somewhere more familiar than here, thinking about the lights of a city projecting their own unsettling sunsets static in the treacle-tar. Permanently on it.
The baby woke at 5:32 and we waited. We played and we laughed and we sang and looked strong and knowledgeable, but the whole time I was glancing out the deep-sea windows to see if the sun had surfaced yet. Gagging for air.
Lydia Unsworth is the author of Certain Manoeuvres (KFS, 2018) and Nostalgia for Bodies (Erbacce, 2018). Winner of the 2018 Erbacce Poetry Prize, she has also had work published in various places including Ambit, Pank, KillAuthor, Tears in the Fence, Banshee Lit, and Sentence: Journal of Prose Poetics.