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.

1991-2006

My father’s pounded-blue Ford
& my feet barely glancing the receipts

& Marlborough cartons piled on the floor

the peeled strips of paintwork     snagging
empty promises       from neon signs

the city’s horizon burning into a yellow pair

of hands    composing the softly-lit dreams
of business men in hotel rooms       screwing

silk ties in their worn palms      their heads full

of yes       every night        a heaved dice
a million shades of blonde        & we are driving

further into it each year      my toes starting to plant

the mat      your hair greying in the rear-view
mirror         & each face from our life together

passing like boarded-up doors

in a neighbourhood
beyond repair

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.