Fleeces

The conversation drips like laudanum
from a thick glass bottle;

they are sheep butting heads in a field
of grass comparison: who has the best grass?

Are our lambs at the right school
to get the high results to land
the correct job to buy the
most grass –

I just like to smoke grass.

The woman opposite me picks the poppy
seeds from her cake and licks the yellow
crumbs that are left; her tongue is grey.

The coffee is steaming.
If I don’t leave soon this will kill the ink
bird I keep in my underwear.

Instead I take the butter knife
and cut a diagonal slice from my stomach:
white rubber drips and collects in my lap.

I shape it into a bowl and fill it
with the brown sugar lumps from the heap
in the centre of the table.

The cotton tablecloth keeps trying to rise
up from the polished dark wood and become
a ghost

but I keep my fingers on it, firmly.

Ruth Stacey  writes poems in the fleeting spaces between motherhood and studying Native American Literature. It is not the easiest way to be a writer, but it is her way.