She gives me a word to look up
in a dictionary of obscure sorrows.

I, who try to decipher echoes from
other people’s reaction to my words

throw down a bucket into the well
recognise water when people tell me

Longing curls its legs up on the sofa in our house.
There’s a dip there now.
How I long to turn us into a day trip.

You belong in that chair over there
asking what happened with that text
and where I bought this jumper,

See the local estate agent crooks
Ten a penny
Smoking their rollies, washed down with
protein
Pigeons with emerald necks

Difficult doctors don’t care about their patients,
They are filling up hospitals and GP practices with their difficult bodies.
They are often late to work and shuffle into handover . . .

. . . .We would go
to the cupboard where multi-packs
of Fine Fare’s basic crisps were sorted
into old shoe boxes, one for each child.

I’d rather be inside
pretending I’m not
pretending commentary
inside my head
is real and here

Some things we hold in trust,
some we forget we even own
and then there’re those items
we hang onto “just in case.”

      Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...

With the neon-splashed night at the window
I counted each contraction down, obediently,
as my mother had told me to do.