Sue Butler
They argue...
... for the last time,
not much to say to each other
but what has been said before.
And because women here
do not go out to drink alone,
she washes up,
a saucepan and two plates,
from a meal they ate so long ago
that she cannot now remember it.
On the kitchen table
there are IOUs and unopened bills;
beetroot and cucumbers
lie ready to he pickled,
and piled in the washing basket
are shirts that need ironing.
She has been trying to catch up
for so long.
She gathers up the pieces
of which she can he sure,
files in her mind: Easter in Novgorod
an afternoon at the Winter Palace,
two of his many letters,
coffee and cakes in Bukhara,
stores them away with other days
pieces of a similar shape,
to get out on evenings
when she fancies a jigsaw
and is drunk enough or lonely enough
to want to reminisce.
At school she would have cut slits
in her cheeks with a razor blade,
mixed her tears
with the red that ran down her face.
She watches the dark water
spiral out of sight
and when she spits on the iron
it hisses.
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The