Laura Tansley

A reminder that I am capable of joy, that I am capable of showering with another person.

Once, I bashed my toe against a table leg so hard the bone jumped right out of my skin, white as cooked chicken, and now I can no longer bear to be near a carcass, or jellified fat. Even the scummy remnants of shampoo lather congealing in the plughole is an occasion for misery, is something to be washed down the drain immediately, a contribution to the pulsing fatberg that resides ten feet from my pillow, blocking the pipes till they burst with arterial force. Wild swimmers don’t worry about this; they have found a way to harness the power of all that waste. They head to rivers with low, rusted, iron-age bridges spanning their widths, shimmy quietly to their sobering middles, and jump into the murk. They like the slip of algae between their toes, the algae that is feeding on the human waste in the suffocated water. They understand that on a hot day, fetid is a ripe, rich place.

Laura Tansley is a writer and tutor. Her collection of visual poems, Notes to Self, was published by Trickhouse Press, and her collection of co-written short stories with Micaela Maftei, The Reach of a Root, was published by Vagabond Voices. She lives and works in Glasgow.

Laura wrote the following about her poem:

A grouchy, cynical narrator has lost track of pleasure and cannot seem to find it again. They are annoyed by and envious of those that can find pleasure in everything, even shite-filled rivers. I was thinking of Pangbourne, and Whitchurch Bridge, and the young people flinging themselves into the Thames. The shape of the poem is fixed in the margins; a wee window, a postcard.