{"id":377,"date":"2011-09-13T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-13T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=377"},"modified":"2011-09-13T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-13T11:00:00","slug":"karen-dennison-on-the-night-he-makes-her-sleep-on-the-floor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/karen-dennison-on-the-night-he-makes-her-sleep-on-the-floor\/","title":{"rendered":"Karen Dennison on 'The night he makes her sleep on the floor'"},"content":{"rendered":"

The night he makes her sleep on the floor<\/span>

she curls blue and shivering like a newborn<\/span>
abandoned at someone\u2019s door. She holds screams<\/span>

in her fists while he snuffles in his sleep. The seconds<\/span>
tick in her head and she wears the hours like the train<\/span>

of a wedding dress, drags them to the kitchen, rests her head<\/span>
on the table, like the remains of something half-eaten.<\/span>

Still he sleeps, while her legs ache with lactic rage. She lies<\/span>
in the empty bath,  cradled by whiteness, lets the darkness<\/span>
 <\/span>
bruise her, washes him  from her face with handfuls<\/span>
of moonlight.  Her shadow-self slides<\/span>
 <\/span>
through homeless streets, crawls inside a window pane<\/span>
on an empty train, hardens to a cold reflection. Sleep comes,<\/span>
 <\/span>
a welcome death.  He wakes to find her rigid like a corpse,<\/span>
glances over her as he leaves for work.<\/span>



*Karen Dennison<\/span>: “I've had poems published in South<\/span>, Orbis <\/span>and The New Writer<\/span> and I have a book <\/span>of poems coming out next year with Indigo Dreams.” <\/span><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The night he makes her sleep on the floorshe curls blue and shivering like a newbornabandoned at someone\u2019s door. She holds screamsin her fists while he snuffles in his sleep. The secondstick in her head and she wears the hours like the trainof a wedding dress, drags them to the kitchen, rests her headon the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}