She keeps writing
the wrong year
at the top of blank pages.
The one before this one.

She faces a white wall.
Imagines climbing it
to come home. An ache

from the strain burns
deep inside her thighs.
A PJ Harvey song
floats through her.

She’s a poet now.
A strengthening wind
cuts a metallic sky.

A sickness coats every strand
of thought, patch
of skin. Longing spreads
in square feet

across the poorest fen
to her heart. The ruler
she measures it with

smells like black honey,
sounds like Chopin
vodka bottles being pulled
from a bed of ice.

Or nothing at all
like it—
nothing at all.