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

fiction

April 2014

Chiral

Paul Currion

fiction

April 2014

I cough while the technician tinkers with the projector, although the two are not related, and I wonder why...

Art

July 2015

Michaël Borremans

Ben Eastham

Art

July 2015

Michaël Borremans is among the most important painters at work in the world today. His practice combines a lifetime’s...

feature

January 2013

A Black Hat, Silence and Bombshells : Michael Hofmann at Cambridge & After

Stephen Romer

feature

January 2013

The black hat and the black coat I was familiar with, before I knew their owner. It was Cambridge,...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required