by Lucina Wareham
“In about eighty years.”
Yet here I sit.
My hairs are crisp cobwebs
crusted with dew
and old bits of moth.
My tongue is snowflake sharp
cool as a knife
but my lips,
a glinting urn
sticky with the ashes of my friends.
My face has veins that pulse
and crack like a cheap hand mirror.
Nobody dares look into it.
All my blood has collected
into a small corner of my mouth
a boil, a pimple
bursting with scarlet and pus.
Crows press their toes into my skull,
drilling their beaks into my brain with their screams,
dropping wretched worms into my ears,
slithering, putrid, venomous worms.
Teeth line my mouth like crooked tombstones
burnt by the yellow smoke that fires my lungs
like when my lips sang sunshine
and I breathed like I loved you.
Now I reach for the paper
and my spine splinters in two.
I know nothing of the world.
I stare at the empty frames on the mantel and smile.
My diet of squashed lentils
and rodent hairs
and oxygen tanks is spoon-fed
directly into my bloodstream.
I am cold all the time.
I bathe in bedsheets
and reabsorb my tears
in china cups too good to use.
Much like those years.
Lucina 'Lucie' Wareham is a self-professed millennial poet hailing from South Shields, with a master’s degree in Creative Writing from Newcastle University. Her interests lie in translation, environmentalism and the concept of combining poetry and music.
