By Keilan Colville
This house is desolate
when I am not cooking you sausages
& instead cooking only for myself
which of course feels more like
cooking for nobody.
The grizzly things
hiss up at me in the grey morning
& there is still so much space on the pan
like in that Joni Mitchell song
about her old man.
What I am saying is stay here.
Don’t go to work.
Make something up. I’ll call for you.
I want this morning to be ordinary
& therefore beautiful.
We can lie in bed & listen to the rain
if it rains or we can watch a film
you can choose & there won’t be bickering
because I am in your earthly arms
& can give you toast & sausages
& beans & bacon
that I want somehow to say
I am sorry for my impossible moods
& the long nights & the harsh silences
but also to say you are the sea
& the sky & everything
beyond them.
Please know that nothing
will cool the flame into hushed death.
I am here. Is the food o.k.?
There’s the rain.
Keilan Colville is a poet from Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh. “Storm and Silence”, his debut pamphlet from Wild Pressed Books, was published in 2020. He has since been published in The Paperclip, a publication by Ulster University, and Awkward Middle Children, an anthology of emerging Northern Irish writers, produced during the 21 Artists Programme. He currently lives in Portstewart and studies an MA in English literature.
