My neighbour irons nights at her first floor window<\/p>\n
keeping one eye for Love Island, the other on me,<\/p>\n
After 6 months she asked if I’d be buying curtains<\/p>\n
with such conviction it sounded like<\/p>\n
she’d witnessed something still to happen.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
These unemployed years<\/p>\n
she contents herself with the amusement of<\/p>\n
someone gratefully retelling a witnessed car-crash,<\/p>\n
logging my late night hours, remarking that<\/p>\n
my tv still glows between pole & frame<\/p>\n
and how, each time she gets up to relieve herself,<\/p>\n
she thinks I must be a vampire.<\/p>\n
Doubtless all the black doesn’t help.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Yet, yesterday I saw a girl so white<\/p>\n
she blazed from the distance<\/p>\n
a planning notice resonates,<\/p>\n
cheek flesh the hardboiled hue of Cool Hand’s bet,<\/p>\n
neck a counter slick of skimmed milk<\/p>\n
butting two unsheathed reams of clavicles,<\/p>\n
with a sternum of tripe pinned so tight<\/p>\n
her cleavage shone like lid-clinging<\/p>\n
home-brand, Greek yogurt,<\/p>\n
limbs tapering into the sun,<\/p>\n
ankles, wrists as Tippex bright<\/p>\n
as her High Top toecaps.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
no matter how much breath her<\/p>\n
floating step, dancing hem<\/p>\n
filleted from me,<\/p>\n
I could not say a word,<\/p>\n
for in the instant of eye-shift behind lens,<\/p>\n
of lip-rise and drop again<\/p>\n
I knew<\/p>\n
that every kiss would leave her mauled<\/p>\n
like a drowned girl in the morgue<\/p>\n
been mapped for bruises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My neighbour irons nights at her first floor window keeping one eye for Love Island, the other on me, After 6 months she asked if I’d be buying curtains with such conviction it sounded like she’d witnessed something still to happen. These unemployed years…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1073,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-half-marathon-poem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1073"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40722,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40650\/revisions\/40722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}