How Much For This?
Your body hangs like a dartboard. Clothes snake the
slippery floor ready to bite. A curtain holds you back
imperfectly as a Tetris block.
This is the first time you have been out in three weeks.
Today sits like a joker between diamonds. Your punctured
skin sags over your bones, and you have dragged it
dangerously down the tarmac to mine this charity
shop for new parts.
Three years since the first lockdown, you still ask if the dressing room is open.
You twist yourself like wire into a top. Admire how reds
and blues bounce off you like a traffic collision. Your bra
is dawning out of the hem, captured in its disaster, blur,
but you send it to the Slags Chat anyway.
The sick folds itself into your joints again.
You wear it like a bus stop, shattering over your
pavements. You pull the accident off your body
Throw it at your body. Throw your body to the
floor and watch the shop roll out from under the
curtains. Lights laddering the boards, feet moving
between rails like chess pieces.
An hour slides down the walls and drips onto your forehead.
You assemble your body gently as a Christmas present.
Return yourself to the shop and unravel like coins over
the counter. They look at you like roadkill. Ask as if it’s
rude to, as if the answer might jump back into the road
any second. You just say
you’re fine, sorry, red as a stop sign.
Ellie Spirrett is currently a member of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective, and was the Some-Antics championship winner in 2023. Their writing addresses chronic illness and ableism, gender-based violence, and the loneliness epidemic.
Incomplete inventory of things I don’t allow myself to miss because after all they might come back
the riding of bikes
the rhythm of legs
the wind-driven tears
the wobbling turns
the handlebarred bags
the motion, the motion
the clatter of work
the Friday-night drinks
the richness of stout
the spread through the blood
the steady sweet drop
the people, the people
the twice-a-week swim
the shoulders like gears
the slices of air
the steadiest breaths
the counting of lengths
the echoes, the echoes
my grandparents’ house
the loom in the shed
the bugs in the berries
the steepest of stairs
the hard narrow beds
the family, the family
the babies the babies
the claims and the clamours
the hands down my t-shirt
the open-mouthed kisses
the chaos and comfort
the trusting, the trusting
the singing and dancing
the running and calling
the weightless exploring
the freedom and safety
the freedom and safety
the freedom, the safety
Erin Coppin is a disabled Canadian/British writer living in the UK. She has been published by Spelt Magazine, Popshot Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Fenland Poetry Journal, and others. She was the winner of the Unpublished Poet’s Prize in the Mslexia and Poetry Book Society’s Women’s Poetry Competition 2019. You can find her on twitter at @coppin_erin, on instagram at @coppin_erin and on the web at www.erincoppin.co.uk.