In case it's unclear

Sandra Noel

I wasn’t in the biscuit tin, garibaldi, bourbon

cream. I didn’t prickle in a box of pins,

wasn’t the rocks in your sack of dreams. Nor

was I lurking on the stairs, Mum waiting,

you working. Not the key slotted in the

door, the creek you heard on the wood-

stained floor. Didn’t shoulder-cry teenage

tears, didn’t love him anyway. It wasn’t me

when I dated more, q uick succession,

rebound boys — I didn’t thank your caring

ploys. Didn’t argue politics, never one to

disagree; didn’t like to see you sick. And

tired. I wasn’t the twist in the garden hose,

not the wind, the sweat of your med-

soaked clothes. I wasn’t your pain. I wasn’t

the words in the stories I told, the dot on

the screen as the tv turned off. Not the

daisy in the concrete yard. I wasn’t there

when you cast off.

Sandra Noel is a poet from Jersey, Channel Islands. She enjoys looking at the ordinary in unusual ways, her passion for water and sea swimming often featuring in her work. Sandra’s work appears online and in print with The Phare, Flights, Black Nore Review, Dragon Yaffle, Cerasus, Reach and Dawntreader. She has poems on the buses in Guernsey in The Guernsey International Poetry Competition. Sandra is working on her first collection.