Sarah M. Harrison

Painting my conversions red
Sarah M. Harrison

This morning burnt coffee
I looked for myself reflected
in the empty
pupil of my eye
an apple shape
burnt its contours here
heart-cut my childhood face
shaped four blank walls

so similar to all those
I’ve inhabited since
 

I only grew so big
on freezer frozen white bread
my ethnicity is erasure
spread thin as imitation butter
the ultimate bottom


Debased and ready
for any kind topping
I used to make everything

up about the past
pathologically replacing
self ignorance
with trite clichés
I am often embarrassed writing
stream poem phone notes

on a tablet
in front of television

disney princess movie
my child

hood self drags
a back pack across floor
boards by
its shark blue polyamide beak
the movie is about work ethic
or class?
Noble worker
I surrender the keys 

But I don’t give up


I doubt these animals
would have suspected
they’d be in my shower

pan 350 years ago
I have two lists
Essentials
Non essentials
I hold non essentials
dearest
essentials will always come back
in some form
I am listlessly sitting
on a park bench
in autumn fraying corduroy
hanging loose above
my bony ankles
kicking fallen green leaves
towards the hedge fund
looming dooming climate crisis
German national bonds
bought at negative interest
telling
don’t you think? 


Why are we so afraid of waiting lines?
You don't have to
shovel sunshine
social anxiety
I am already mourning
the electrical tower
of all things I’ll mourn
the dotage will prove trivial
stubborn ignorance
will remember us

Future Humans
or some
Other Entity Wandering
about the clumsy deep scars
left in the wake
of all of that erasure
stale smoke rising through plastic
floored by chain smoked free base CBD
I am trying
to convince myself
that I am not dead inside

while feeling dead inside
derisive adjectives follow
Darling, I am living outside the ring lonely
alone I desire intimacy and your personal
information please don't be embarrassed
I am impressed
I am such a loser
I am humble
I amaze you
Which is realer; outside or inside? 

It seems about the right time to wake up
get explicit about your disease!
Black pools swell in ultrasound mumbles
my kind faced narrow shouldered hunched
rheumatologist remarks! 

She has never seen anything like it
I see nothing blobby black and grey shapes
stroke 
denuded bones with a lubed probe
stuck at uncomfortable angles
threaded with rods 
bulging muscles strain
under the coarse external veins 
of my masculine unconsciousness

Every movement momentous pain
all my friends are water soluble
 

Celebrity poet tutorial circles here
she writes “hidden meaning”
circles “you” 
writes “means I”
Oh, doesn’t it though? I feel
like she is harbouring
whatever that means...
Her ship has docked
on my wharf
she is accumulating amplitude 
hooked to my power
and pipes
draining my batteries
shedding her waste
spoiling my space
social media inscrutable
On new moon
I stay out
all night collecting coins
from unattended public water fountains
vanquishing wishes 

That’s Me
the bad bitch hands you used paper towel
carbon neutral
crying in confusion
at Fridays for future
chanting for climate
change everything
coasting stairwell dance
from door to door to door
five ecologically manufactured ceramic plates
unravelled from fifteen meter ream of bubble wrap
wrappers wrapping wrapped
never ending spatial diminuendo
of cardboard boxes packed like
Russian dolls holding
two centilitres of unnecessary essential oils and
broken reusable picnic cutlery.