Poetry & Prose by Carol J Forrester
He wants to know why
I’m so bothered by such a small
incidental thing.
Doesn’t understand
the ratcheting wind in my nerves
has been so slow,
so steady,
so long in the build up
that any reason is good enough
to make me snap.
I am very good at sweating the small thing,
like watermarks on a kitchen counter
that are really tea stains
from what must have been the teabag chucking Olympics
because the kettle is the other end of the room,
as are the mug, and the tea caddies,
and oh yes, the sugar!
In fact the milk is the only thing not that end,
unless you were the one doing the brews
in which case the milk is also that end
because heavens forbid it should live in the fridge
where it might just survive to its use-by
instead of souring like my expression
whenever I come downstairs to find dishwasher
empty!
but no space to move for dirty plates, cups, bowls,
all stacked smallest to largest
in cracked crockery Jenga challenge number sixty,
guess it’s time to see what’s on sale
in the supermarket kitchen department.
There are no hooks or bait.
The skill is standing barefoot
when the ice water runs across your toes
and the feeling goes thick in your fingers
waiting for the hum in the current.
You can be there for months,
lock-kneed and bent into shapes
you must learn yourself out of.
Still the Poem Fish does not swim
in those waters,
or if it does you sense it slip
smaller than a minnow
through the splayed net of your hands,
watch the words melt and rush
away with the rest of the river current.
Other days the Poem Fish arrive in shoals,
thrash themselves over each other
to leap into your hands.
Those are the days you learn
which Poem Fish to throw back to grow
and which you should take a knife to,
split open along the belly seam
and spill onto the page.
Some will turn before you cut,
a dead thing dead before you thump
its scaled head against the rocks,
and filled with sand.
Those are not Poem Fish,
they will not fill you up.
She has the same look about her,
or so it seems
when she tilts her cheek just so
and the tides shift,
shrink in on themselves
so ashamed by her disappointment.
Uncanny, how similar she seems
reflected beside me.
In the car she scolds me for swearing,
for slipping out the word sugar
with the same spitting fury I’ve heard
spring from her mouth.
