After the Party
Someone stuffed the downed bottle
with screwed wrappers, sweets twisted
from their casings: a fish scale mosaic,
silvered skins scrunched. The gaps
– still lakes of air and glass distortion
around dead-gilled traces of party, fun,
life… All contorted to fill the shape
of emptiness; its gagged mouth,
throat, neck…space enough, just,
for the thin wax of one lit candle.
Sarah James‘s first poetry collection, Into the Yell (Circaidy Gregory Press, 2010), won third prize in the International Rubery Book Awards 2011 and her second, Be[yond], is published by Knives, Forks and Spoons Press (July 2013).Her website is at www.sarah-james.co.uk
After the Party appears in (from Be[yond], Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2013)