The Circles on Your Ceiling
You wake up (so you tell me)
to the lurid gold of summer
splashed like paint across
your tea-brown walls;
curlicues across your bed-
room ceiling: complex, inter-
locking circles (‘rings left
by Goliath’s teacups upside
down across a tray’) that
keep you entertained for
hours, until you see it’s late
and you have work to do:
like phoning me to talk about
the other circles in your life
of solitude and curves: its
snail-shells, roundabouts
and clocks; its sleeping cats
and moons; the globe of
rock and water spinning
underneath your feet …
One morning, as you’re
listing other circles not yet
mentioned, a scream cuts
through our conversation,
slicing it in two. Then silence
as we pause for breath,
working out whose mouth
it was whose big round O
released that cannonball …
Chris Rice‘s work has appeared widely in magazines. Extracts from a literary memoir, Diary of a Pembridge Poet, can be found online at The London Magazine. His second collection, In Transit, was published in May 2024 by Pindrop Press.