Poetry

First Night Without

On the monochrome stick

Of your 4am kitchen lino

I sit

Forehead to knee,

Pooling my breath in the space between.

I am warm and tender,

The gape of a lost tooth.

A tingling numbness of something

Never; pins and needles in a limb

not quite mine.

I no longer fit my skin

I feel it hanging loose from my frame,

The sag of old lettuce leaves.

Below it – muscles, bones, ligaments

Tracing my anatomy

Xylophonic

Over the ridges of my ribs, it rolls

Contouring the cavern of my abdomen

And dripping from the ends of fingers

 – prints lost like milk in a swirl of tea.

Johanna Hateley