Laura Tansley

What to wear to a wedding when you hate the bride and groom and other passive aggressive acts

Awful, just terrible, isn’t it dreadful, the feeling I get when I think about you. The type of feeling that demands

I place my head in the delivery tray of the nearest vending machine.

But we get on with it don’t we, and there is comfort to be had in vast, resinous-smelling, home furnishing warehouses, pushing capacious trolleys and creating personal philosophies

that are worth sharing with you as you embark on this new journey, such as, it is remarkable

now I think about it, certainly worth remarking on, how life is like my collapsible washing basket: one minute you’re up and the next you’re totally sunk.

Yes the rubber is splitting because baskets aren’t meant to fold up and down and it used to make sense to simply use

a big bag. Yes I have questions like why would I complicate life  

by trying to save space? And which bin is it going to go in at the tip? The answers are, at best, the size of a wardrobe

requiring of two bodies to wrangle the bulk of both the personal and the general, which is perfect in this context.

A wardrobe is a funny thing, amusing the way empty space is filled with empty space then all of a sudden

the stress of its enterprise is leaving dents, black mould, carpet rucks like skin folds along an eager stomach. Still we keep on don’t we and we won’t mention

how the glass you dropped on the rug at my engagement party killed the whole evening. It bounced but it was dead before it landed.

Laura Tansley lives and works in Glasgow. A pamphlet of her visual poems, Notes to Self, is available from Trickhouse Press.