"We wouldn’t be able to undo it", "Bird Ugly", "Tunnel Vision", & "The Changing Shape of Me" by Charlotte Cosgrove

We wouldn’t be able to undo it

if we kissed.

That is lust to me - 

Something to covet.

Even if :

You never told anyone

I would know, we would know.

A decoy

To command inclination

Sharing breath like ancients.

Methanobrevibacter oralis, that old microbe

The place where you form words 

Close it in language impotency.

Where you eat

Where you vomit

Where you tell me you don’t love me

It would mean something. 

Bird Ugly

He came home today with Bird Ugly

One eye big

One eye small

This is how he sees the world.

It’s beautiful, I say

As I try to display it on the bookshelf.

I turn him profile 

This poster painted

Papier mache

Primary school object

That is my mistake.

I show one eye to the world

I forget the beauty of both

Of difference.

Tunnel Vision

You’ve made a home for the ghosts,

Living in lost peripheral vision.

All the things once known:

A dead mother who stands in the corner of the room

Twenty five years after her death.

Nothing is at the end of the tunnel

There are no goals to meet 

No holidays to book, nothing new  

What is no longer behind you is beside you

Everything is balanced

These ghosts - 

They walk with you.

The Changing Shape of Me  

I am amorphous.

I wake unbloated.

Changing shape.

Expanding.

Decreasing.

Bigger, smaller.

Stretching skin.

Thick or thin.

Big or small, round as a ball.

Wear black to look small.

Don’t take up too much space.

Don’t wear horizontal stripes

Don’t rub self love in their face.

That top hides a multitude of sins.

Pass the scissors.

Cut the label out.

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.