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Two poems from Glut

Ramona Herdman

Two poems from Ramona Herdman’s new poetry collection, Glut, published in August 2022 by Nine Arches Press.

 

Salad spinner

 

I have failed to convey to you why

I hate it so much. You laugh.

There’s something obscene in plastic things –

 

that the dinosaurs died, prehistoric forests

went to mush, the whole world boiled down

to an abscess of oil underground and

 

the present world ripped apart to get it out.

Roads stampede through the woods,

nothing untrodden, most of it landfill

 

within a couple of decades, and still

the churning factories. You stand there,

turning it, tiny prim plastic wheels biting on

 

nothing, the world mumbled down in its gums

to get us dry lettuce. I do nothing about any of it.

It makes me want to spit when you take

 

the rinsed leaves from me, stand with it

under one arm like a mandolin, whirring. Worst

is that I suspect I don’t even think this:

 

it’s all wholesale from my mother,

dirty hippy, proud as a filthy old aristocrat.

This is something to do with her life thirty years ago.

 

I am too good for you. As you make my dinner

I blame you for everything I haven’t done

since I was twenty. Stop being so considerate

 

with your damn salad. Let me out of this lovely

Victorian semi on the right side of town, mortgage

practically paid off, convenient for the theatre.

 

Let me eat pesticides. Let me eat mud.

 

 

 

The car after the car

 

that I learnt to drive in (my instructor’s Golf)

was a cast-off from a builder housemate.

Dear faded green estate, cement-dust-sparkling.

It meant we could go between houses, if one of us

forgot something from home of an evening.

 

This was after the days I’d called him Toothbrush Boy

to my work-friends, determined, though I’d let him

leave his toothbrush, we were Not A Couple.

Time was slower then. The estate a tabernacle

of wood-splinters. Mossy window-seals. Rust-nibbles.

 

It lasted years, then we traded it in

for an Escort when we needed something sensible

to manage the motorway trips the year my dad

was dying of cancer. A car that did the job.

How clean and whole the Escort looked beside

 

my dad’s Skoda Superb the day we opened it up

to find it like a salt mine – the insides coated

in flakes of fag-ash like opals. Ash-plush

grey seats. White glints. Silver. Ash powdering

the genital leatherette folds round the gear stick.

 

Ashy footwells and ceiling. Everything ashed except

the clear shadow on the driver’s seat. Ash stirring

in the air from the opened door – like the shiver

of the pale undersides of leaves, or the shudder

through a grey huddle of bats, about to fly.

 

 

‘Salad spinner’ was previously published in A warm and snouting thing (The Emma Press).

 

 

 

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