Photograph by Scott Barron Photography
A Day in the Life
• O larceny of Tupperware!
• This is my home: gothic, chaotic
• The bucket
collecting drips from the ceiling
moved again, I could swear
to it. Spent the whole morning
• Trying to recall the name of a girl I knew –
something beautiful and plain at the same time
like Sweetheart Cabbage
• What to call attrition when it can be perceived?
This tap for instance
• This tap has decided to consolidate its drips
into one long greasy thread, water stylus,
fanged maw of a Pleistocene mammal opening
endlessly
• Spent a good half hour
trying to remember an actress
whose eyebrows were drawn on (like the unbranched antlers of a pricket)
• To soften the sound, the bucket has a layer of toilet paper
• Lunch will be frugal. Something with zero succulence
• My painted nails are chipped to wounds:
assorted proportions
• Could the force of the drips
be moving the bucket?
• All my wounds have faded to scars except this
recent burn: warm as a USB stick,
weeping its clean smell of belts and clean genitals
• Denial is to avoid meter readings and to never check the water
level of the bucket
• Denial is to push poetry away
• Denial is to sleep
•
•
•
• Dinner will be a rough affair. Wrote one blogspot on bread rationing,
now I'm Rosie the Riveter Tinned
things
• I peel open the corned beef to a dog's breath meridian
• For poetry I am nil by brain. For luscious
I have zero tolerance
• O that tyrant the poltergeist bucket!
• And so begins the season of dried blood. Turns out
• Karma is a mountain of Tupperware without a single lid
Louise Peterkin is a poet from Edinburgh. In 2016 she was a recipient of a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust in the poetry category. She is the co-editor, along with Rob A. Mackenzie, of Spark: Poetry and Art inspired by the Novels of Muriel Spark (Blue Diode Press, 2018). She is an assistant poetry editor for The Interpreter's House. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including The Dark Horse, One Hand Clapping, The Glasgow Review of Books, Magma and The North, and her first collection of poetry, The Night Jar, is out now, published by Salt.