Poetry | Ink Sweat and Tears

Britta Giersche

3am

a wooden door slams shut in my brain

a man perishes in a space the size of his grave from malnutrition eighty years ago

(I travel on my mother’s electric waves that held their spoken words’ shape)

I am sorry that the thud left a hole in your dream like a lost stitch in a schoolgirl’s needlework

the drumming of car tyres forms a mirror-like sound on the asphalt road

a beam of light casts a languorous glance over our bodies

for six seconds

(the length of a yawn)

I catch the warm updraft, rising from your breathing

Britta Giersche is German. She lives in London and is writing her first book of poetry.

The instruction invites overthinking:
describe your hometown through
the medium of simple sentences

I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive,
ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not
something I know how to cook.

I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other.

Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift
has hacked the WiFi password
in the ear canal and now I’m looping back
endlessly to a misheard lyric . . .

Laid down, his upraised face is
White – offputting – on a plumped pillow.

“The all-consuming passion
is rarely found
more than a recipe
for misery,”
you read

He appears like a paper bag blown onto the feeder,
punching his beak time and again into the peanuts.

If you follow faerie lights
that wisp where boardwalk
becomes trackway, make sure
you’re stocked with milk,
or bread and salt.

My father stitched an evening with current ripples
spill over rocks and shadows gather at the corner,