Reaching Into Boxes

It takes time
to brush the spaces,
months between my teeth.

Truth is a small-headed brush
cleaning silently
through the night.

When I was a student
I could fit everything I owned
into these little indentations.

What happened?
I am not
a proper girl.

The thing I love most,
more than my clothes,
is my decay.

* * *

I wasn’t planning on writing any poems this week. I was on vacation from poem-writing after the month-long poetry party that was April. Also, I am moving house this week and knee deep in boxes. But poems love such moments!

Late at night, having just cleaned my teeth, I felt drawn to the split page technique I used for Dream Macaroni. (One of my favourite poems from this year’s NaPoWriMo.)  I love the strange atmosphere this technique creates – surreal and yet true.

Take an A4 piece of lined paper and fold it down the middle. Write a topic heading at the top of one side of the paper and then write a contrasting topic heading at the top of the other. For each of your headings, free-write as much as you can around the topic. Now unfold your piece of paper and read across from left to right. Can you make any sense? Now write a poem in which you connect two things which might, at first glance, seem very different or not connected at all.

— Helen Mort, from Poetry and the Brain.

Source: The Poetry School

The two subjects for this poem are – not surprisingly – dental hygiene and moving house.

You will remember this night

Driving down a long suburban road,

travelling alone in the blue dusk,

you know you cannot go back.

Every road is leading somewhere,

even this one with its rows of identical boxes,

doors shut to the evening.

Everything that happens is your road:

the houses and the people,

the lights and the dark.

You have no sense of what's inside,

but there is light in the window,

a yellow mist,

like the edge of a flame,

that does not change,

that cannot go out.

You will remember this moment 

when you stopped your car

and stood alone in the road.

You will remember this night,

this street, as beautiful,

the houses like lanterns.

Containers of light, it is right 

that the doors are closed.

In the morning they will open once again.

Folding The Twilight

Hands circling,

gathering the ancient air,

my mother folds the twilight

into night.