2 poems by Sallyanne Rock

Everything is Very Broken This is a sat-nav error. I don’t recall making three left turns but this feels circular. Last time, when you failed to turn up dead, we got back in the car and drove, turned and turned the map but it stayed upside down. I don’t remember what colour your eyes are having never looked into them. Your voice is not familiar when it says happiness is not the same as the relief of being yanked free from a bathroom window as flames engulf the house.

Fist-sized chunks

“the vehicles are further reduced to fist-sized chunks of metal… glass, plastic and rubber are removed from the mix, and the metal is sold” We fuck in my car on your driveway after a meal out. Later that evening you kick in my passenger door to punish me. Each morning that follows I push my fingertips into the gnarled dent until one day I crash on the way home from work and the car gets towed away. I picture metal resisting the heavy jaws that mangle it into a neat cube. I wonder who will recover me and if I will have my useful components removed before I am compressed into a convenient shape.

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Sallyanne Rock was born in the Black Country and now lives in Worcestershire. Her poetry appears in various journals online and in print, including Eye Flash and Finished Creatures. She is the recipient of the Creative Future Writers' Award Gold Prize for Poetry 2019.