Tuesday poem #555 : Lydia Unsworth : Featherlight

 

One by one, the houses are run down. Link-style maisonettes with their bellies sliced out. While I remain the same, dated as interior design, open to visitors, like a fine example, shackled in glass, of a postwar estate. I was meant to live like this, small, nurtured. Hanging gardens, oval Bonsai dishes, we were two and the same. Can anyone else see these streets, their buried gods, the blood from our shins like shadows in gravel, these graves? Private housing associations bleach our village greens as I photograph this new undoing.

 

 

 

 

 

Lydia Unsworth’s latest collections are Arthropod (Death of Workers) and Mortar (Osmosis). Pamphlets include Residue (above/ground), cement, terraces (Red Ceilings), and YIELD (KFS). Poems in places like Ambit, Banshee, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold, Oxford Poetry, PERVERSE, and Shearsman. This poem is from These Steady Bulbs, forthcoming in January with above/ground press.

Photo credit: Liza Stokport

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan