I’m excited to share two poems from my new collection, EX-CETERA, which will be published by Nine Pens at the end of September [this month]. These poems were originally published as a single poem by One Hand Clapping.
You can pre-order EX–CETERA here. And if you’re a book blogger or reviewer and would like a pdf ARC, please email me! hlrwriter@outlook.com ♥
Trigger warning: self-harm, suicidal ideation
xxx
Worried to Death (1)
There was an inexplicable period when
we’d always drink a bottle of champagne before bed,
sometimes two. A ludicrous luxury; unsustainable, silly.
I did not recognise myself but joined in gladly.
There was something different about fucking tipsy
on Perrier-Jouët—something glistening, elevated, fizzy.
I don’t know where you found the money to support all those
popped corks. I never asked. Better to ignore my ignorance.
We’d always drink a bottle of champagne before bed.
We worried about those who didn’t: those who didn’t drink
a bottle of champagne before bed & those who didn’t worry.
You believed we were living the dream—though whose, exactly,
I can’t say. You’d say, Look at us, young & beautiful
& in love & having so much fun, but I worried
constantly, generalised anxiety & dread & panic
rotting the soft parts of me. You worried about
politics & social justice & inequality & about me, justifiably.
Once I woke up to you checking my pulse, my breathing, fearing
I’d taken too many quetiapine tablets again & died in my sleep.
The risk was always there: suicidal tendencies, the shit-stirring
third wheel of this party. Maybe that’s why you’d make us drink
champagne so frequently: to celebrate my body’s tenacity,
how it always refused to die, how it stubbornly clung on to being
alive despite my litany of efforts to render myself otherwise.
We’d always drink a bottle of champagne before bed:
it reminded us that we weren’t quite dead yet.
x
Worried to Death (2)
It’s absurd how I can no longer clink
a glass in cheers without thinking
of you. The image arrives automatically:
you, tangled in sweaty bedsheets, knife slicing
the top off a strawberry, plonking it into my drink
with ceremony, your face grinning gold, beaming
& me the next morning, discovering the knife secreted
in a pile of laundry where you’d hidden it from me.
Better to be safe than sorry.
I was always so sorry.
HLR 