Today’s choice
Previous poems
Jo Farrant
Losing it before the UFO can find a parking spot
Used to be the stain inside a makeup bag, glossed on inside cheek, socked on the stairs, Auntie at the Embassy, the sink over adverts and the sinnerman,
and too much, I’ll keep going: my face, not like the moon, my face, like a hot cd. We’re stuck on a scene, frozen,
like the ice cubes I begged Mum to get with the little flowers in them. Like taking a test in the school gym but your knees are so big they’re banging into the desk.
When he asked you out and you didn’t want him to. The text from him (different one) in his 30s who wants you very much. Your chest all safe and tucked away.
A horrific birthday with the candles from up the road and the bad singing, the spreadful orange lights on spitty slippers.
Like your fixations that might just be non-human ponderings. Whether you are or ever will be human or not. Like the lyrics of a beautiful song– goes ahh, aaaahhh.
The sleep after something terrible, the terribleness sticking your stomach bits together. 16th Christmas sliding under it, a present you will never ever remember.
My chest under his legs. His neck in my hips, like in that bit where you’re not sure if it’s part of your back or not.
Never wanting him behind you. Wanting to see him and see you on him, so you knew there was a you to look at.
Looking at someone through a straw right up to your eye and going “I seeee youuuu”. Watching the film from the sofa,
no edges to my legs. Sitting on a dining chair in the middle of the living room. Mum, folding over pieces of hair and using her nails as a comb, and then a pen,
and then folding me up and laying me flat above my head, using my own leg to push through the parting.
She says How, Why, When, When, en, en. Until I’m stuck in a pool of ns and there’s so much Mumness that I need floaties to stay up.
And her voice sounds like it does after something. Pressed into a train seat and covered in fabric annnnd dulled under the tv
and shouting at the sofa annnnnd standing where the computer used to be, spinning spinning, messing up my plaits so she has to start over
until the pattern’s no longer a pattern but a nest I’ve built for needing to want her, for when I’m there and when I’m not and never ever remember.
Jo Farrant is a UK writer. Their work invites an intimacy into the digital and the absurd. Pieces can be found in Cringe mag, and The Canvas Arts Magazine.
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