Separate
Sometimes I’m the wind in your garden
where your hands pluck the pegs
from the line & I hold each stitch
of your dress & streamed hair silently
for a second carrying your exquisite human weight
once again with its intricately slick mechanisms
of pressure & release & sometimes I’m a shoal
of birds exploding from the side of your house
slipped through the corner of your eye you stop
for a moment a memory teases from the lawn
& I want to tell you I need you that your eyes
are all the clichés we read about eyes wrestled
into a knot & lit that your clavicles hold the light
like buckets brimmed with rain but I’m not here
the sun slides off the wall & you get back to the task
of filling the bowl with clothes the breeze dropping
down to the floor as you pull a band from your back-
pocket squeeze a silly notion through the tip
of your ponytail turn & walk back through the door
Daniel Sluman is a 28 year old writer based in Cheltenham, whose debut Absence has a weight of its own was released to critical acclaim in 2012 through Nine Arches Press. He has been published widely in journals in the UK and abroad, including B O D Y, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Hinterland, and Popshot. He gained a BA and MA in Creative Writing at University of Gloucestershire, and won AHRC funding for his PhD into Disability Poetics, at BCU starting in 2014.