share


Swimming Pool; No Ladder

You realise you haven’t eaten in days.

 

Dirty dishes line the counters; your twin toddlers

glitch in and out of their high chairs, mustering

twin howls of outrage.

You give up;

pass out on a floor slick with plumbing malfunctions.

Someone, as always, is watching

and will come to your aid.

 

Your husband is home from work

but his pay barely touches the bills strewn

across the front lawn. Sometimes

you wish for a meteor, or a swarm of bees.

Sometimes you think the only way out

of this suburban hellscape is through the foundations,

trapped waist-deep, pissing yourself into the cellar.

 

Someone will make it all right;

and anyway none of this is real:

leading scientists

guess we are ninety-nine-per-cent probably

living a simulation.

 

Against your better judgment, you pull up a chair and

Play Video Games until 6 a.m.

 

You realise you haven’t eaten in days.


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

is studying for an MSt in Creative Writing while working as a part-time bookseller. She has written poetry since her teens, when she was a two-time Foyle Young Poet, and was the Ledbury Festival Young Poet in Residence in 2016. She completed her undergraduate degree in English at Cambridge.



READ NEXT

Interview

November 2014

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

J. S. Tennant

Interview

November 2014

Juan Goytisolo is one of Spain’s leading writers, but one with a fraught relationship with his home country, to put it...

feature

May 2014

How Imagination Remembers

Maria Fusco

feature

May 2014

How imagination remembers is twofold, an enfolded act of greed and ingenuity. I believe these impulses to be linked...

fiction

January 2014

Son of Man

Yi Mun-yol

TR. Brother Anthony of Taizé

fiction

January 2014

Rain falling onto thick layers of accumulated dust had left the windows of the criminal investigations office so mottled...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required