Lot's Wife Edition 4

Lot’s Wife • Edition Four
A Progression
Words by Lydia Strohfeldt
Jigsaw
Sometimes the pieces are prettier
than the picture.
The parts that don’t fit say more
than the pieces
that do.
Am I Not Your Favourite Archetype?
People like him
make you count yourself
in adjectives.
Adding up words in search
of a personality.
Hoping for a hook,
a likeability,
a desirability.
You’ll start to pray:
you’re a character
in a book.
Capable of making someone
feel enough to think
you’re their answer.
All metaphors,
all revelations.
Incompatibility
The mornings were made for mapping
as the ceiling learned our day.
It was then we convinced our differences
to be a balance,
the way the earliest hours of the day
are still dark enough to be mistaken
for the middle of the night.
But by sundown
we had stopped giving out clichés
like they could direct us any way
from the space between us.
Sleep Walking
Insomnia follows me into the shower,
turning the steam into a starry night;
Convincing the water to wash off the dirt
but not the day.
No wonder she’s going to keep me up all night.
Haunted
Some people don’t realise:
They haunt their own words.
They leave unfinished business
in every promise they can’t keep.
They make ghosts out of
I love you,
after leaving it for dead.
The Paper Boats
When me became we,
I took myself down to the river
to send away my poetry.
I folded it into tiny paper boats
and let them set sail.
Now I have no poetry to tell me what to do.
I never noticed
how well-groomedd it kept love;
how often it polished romance.
I didn’t realise
how many ugly words it tossed aside.
I got too confident with a real man,
with real hands
to carry all that heart
I used to hide in my pen.
So I found myself back down at the river,
my paper boats of poetry
gone.
The only shipwreck in sight
myself.
I thought about drowning the new, ugly words
I’d left with my real man.
But words don’t sink, or burn,
or take off with the wind.
Once something has been said,
it can never be unsaid.
Without my poetry,
I guess I’ll have to teach myself new lines
To stay afloat, or put out fires with.
I think I’ll start with:
I’m sorry.
Waking Up
I started to act like the sun,
retreating behind cloud,
just to keep his eyes on me.
Never again will I dull myself
for another.
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