by Charlotte Cosgrove

The things I notice when I’m throwing up

Toothpaste coagulating in the sink bowl like melted flumps. Droplets Of piss on the floor.

Pubic hairs entwining like lovers in the plug hole. Skirting boards dusted with dead skin.

Brushes filled with hair and dandruff. Shampoos with curdled liquids stuck to their bodies -

Turned to stone upon their descent. Tomorrow, I must attack it with gusto. For now - I face

downwards my sick clotting and circling in the toilet bowl.

Roots

If you cut up the earth

Would you find the twists and knuckles

Of my roots in the soil

Curving and braided like plaits

Would we have to dig further

Keep going below, below

Until the mulchy earth broke like bread

In searching hands.

Would there be one piece of me

One line to follow

Knotted like chaos

With no time to unpick.

I’ll be

Financially stable & healthy spends a tenner on a McDonalds do everything in moderation orders two glasses of wine at the same time only eat one biscuit eat one packet of biscuits look in the mirror and not hate myself whisper you fat bitch not letting anyone make me feel lesser for the way I look feel like the fat bastard of the room walk more get using them legs walk home like John Wayne with chub rub on my thighs

Hell is at the bottom of your Doom Scrolling

Close your eyes as another bloodied body flits across your screen.

Some newspaper telling you -

Unwashed salad vegetables will give you cancer.

Race riots in the streets as police officers are torn

From bikes and kicked in the back

Whilst brown girls are kicked in the head.

The word kicked and the act of kicking begins to lose its vigour.

There’s more forest fires somewhere else (phew, not here)

More crazy scientists warning of ecological collapse –

The consequences are dire, we need to act now.

And you feel a voice seeping into your brain -

Do you want a cup of tea?

Remember when they normalised swastikas

And white supremacy

And a black moving for a white on the bus.

It's not a timeline of events anymore

Its all together – keep scrolling

Until your thumbs lose their fingerprint

Until your heart loses its soul.

A video of a posh man telling you, yes you, it's time to

STOP THE BOATS.

He says these waves of ‘people’ are an infestation

As he talks to you from his 2 million pound house –

We’re just the same, me and you.

In the end there is nothing for it

But to put down the phone and take

that cup of tea that warms your hands.

Other people’s problems, other people’s doom.

Diminishing

Keeping your hair long to hide

a buffalo hump full of fat.

You imagine what it would look like seeping out of you

Like the yellowy brown of liposuctioned fat -

My mother would call it the colour of boiled shite.

Remember the story you heard about the man

Who died from using an industrial vacuum cleaner

to suck the fat from his torso.

Always trying to take more away.

How much of ourselves are we willing to lose?

BIO: Charlotte Cosgrove is a writer and lecturer from Liverpool. She has published two collections of poetry and is the editor of Rough Diamond poetry journal.

five poems

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