Free Verse Revolution:

The submission deadline for Issue VII: Tahmina (love & loss) is August 21st. Below is a poem by Selima Hill to inspire you!

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Why I Left You by Selima Hill

When you had quite finished

dragging me across your bed

like a band of swaggering late-night removal men

dragging a piano

the size and shape of the United States of America

across a tent,

I left the room,

and slipped into the garden,

where I gulped down whole mouthfuls of delicious aeroplanes

that taxied down my throat

still wrapped in sky

with rows of naked women in their bellies

telling me to go,

and I went,

and that’s why I did it,

and everything told me so —

tracks that I knew the meaning of

like the tracks of a wolf

wolf-hunters know the exact colour of

by the tracks of the tracks alone.

You get a feeling for it.

You stand in the garden at night

with blood getting crisp on your thighs

and feel the stars spiralling right down

out of the sky into your ears,

burrowing down inside your ears

like drip-fed needles

saying Get out. Now.

By ‘you’ I mean me.

One of us had to:

I did. 

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