A Dead Poet

Laura Ashworth

Once you thought you could not have them, rounded belly now a lovely curse, tight grip around the spatula, the bacon spits you cannot write.

The daffodils are growing strong it is bee season and they want your flowers. One by one, roots exposed with a face like a fist, you pull them up.

Soggy boots at the door he is home. He, the bogeyman the lost daddy

the one that slipped inside your ear with ink that gave a wink to all the pretty skirts. He took you half way there, but you drove yourself mad.

You never had a chance, cracked against the bowl and poured. The oven, the incubator, the talking stove

that says, you cannot write

with that grin on your face. You complain, there is nothing in my head. She needs the moon. She needs her pillbox back.

She knows his name death, death, the rotting pomegranate. The sick, safe way he makes her feel. Yes, she knows how it is to taste it on her tongue. She is the real Lady, arisen twice only to plop back down.

The grave, the final day, the baby’s bottle and warm milk, the door locked, the little girl, the bumblebee in the iron box that stung for twenty years. And him, and him.