- my son lies asleep in a tin sandwich box
- inside the knapsack of a man
- deep within the Cayuga salt mine’s
- corridor of teeth where there’s the sound of what
- in my son’s dreams he takes to be
- our neighbour’s cough but means, in fact,
- they’re blasting new seams in the caverns
- beneath the man who now, ravenous,
- peels the misted clingfilm and only slightly surprised
- to find the naked child – limbs folded, neat
- as travel cutlery – thinks whoever let their son
- be wrapped up for a stranger’s lunch
- does not deserve to keep him, crunching down
- on the still-soft bones and it is only as I hear
- the man’s involuntary noises of pleasure
- rising from far beneath the earth that I remember
- no, my son is in the back seat
- and that is just the sound of him snoring, head loose
- on his neck, terribly alive, as the wheels
- of the car on the salted tarmac
- deliver us both to soft play.
mar 31 2020 ∞
mar 31 2020 +
mar 31 2020 +