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

Art

July 2014

Operation Paperclip

Naomi Pearce

Patrick Goddard

Art

July 2014

‘I began at this point to feel that politics was not something “out there” but something “in here” and of...

Prize Entry

April 2016

Oögenesis

Karina Lickorish Quinn

Prize Entry

April 2016

After her daughter had – for the third time, no less – laid her eggs in the fruit bowl,...

poetry

Issue No. 8

The Cloud of Knowing

John Ashbery

poetry

Issue No. 8

There are those who would have paid that. The amount your eyes bonded with (O spangled home) will have...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required