'Eating Spring Onions Whole'
and Other Poetry

Lottie Inkster

EATING SPRING ONIONS WHOLE

The Creator has an uncertain hand. His lines are feathered and half-formed, caught in that

space between conception and completion. His fingers shake, anticipating, and he presses too

heavily; leaves dark streaks in the shadow of his movement across the page. The paper is

tattooed with His skin.

Horses have an incredibly strong lower oesophageal sphincter. So strong in fact that it only

works one way. The muscles of the valve that sits between the stomach and oesophagus - the

‘Swiss tie’ - will only allow food to enter. Even in cases of extreme indigestion or food poisoning,

a horse cannot vomit. Instead, they develop fatal colic. I see the indent of His pencil in the way

they lay down and die, felled by a bad grain.

I see it again when I break my collarbone. Slip in the shower while drunk. I’m not really there.

Don’t hear the snap or crunch or whatever sound bones make when they hit hard tile. Eyes

smudged with charcoal, lying in a pool of my own vomit. I can only imagine how quick it was.

Humans feel so rudimentary when we break.

I do my best work when I’m drunk and or angry. That’s when I feel closest to Him, I think,

because everything’s in colour. It’s like one of those magic eye puzzles. Where you need to

squint and blur your vision so that all you can see is The Image. God, even now I can see where

his hand has etched over my lines. Fucker.

A FLAG AND A CURTAIN

I want empty words and a solid frame beneath. I live in air not popcorn ceilings but still grip onto

the windowsill where my tulips never grew. There are weeds, those bastard growths that

travelled by bird or by compost. Half-dried reminders of what should be. But try as you might

[water runs down her chest to pool in her bellybutton, a shoot of bittercress begins to grow from

it] those muscles will stay bound tight and fixed like some failed Galatea. I can meet my own

gaze - reddened but not heated - and maybe keep my eyes open when you kiss me. Perhaps

thought kills the thing. Absurdity cannot exist without thinking it so. And is that what this is?

Another dumbbell curl in a sweat flecked mirror? Calf muscle seized up against the cabinet,

coaxing a ridiculed flower back into its bud. If I strum four chords [her thumb - a blister burst to

reveal newer, redder, smoother skin beneath - runs down down up up down up] will it make me

identical with myself? Do you think bitter Criseyde heard his laughter from the eighth sphere?

THE WATER MEN

Static in moving bodies

Some kind of freezing

Self made men do not make

But for the fruits they hold above the pool

He sees them hanging in their glass boxes

Through his glass above the sink

They look out on nothing

Suspended before decay

He would reach for them

But the water blurs when he does

Plums returned to stone

Ground to pulp beneath misplaced train tracks