Poem of the Week: ‘Forward through the adverts’ by Lee Switzer

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again; week by week the submissions for Poem of the Week continue to get better and better, making our final decisions harder and harder, but all the more enjoyable for it. This week has been no different, and was an incredibly tough race to call, with narrowing down the best poem from each poet hard enough, let alone the best poem over all, but we got there in the end. So, to the poets that haven’t made it into our top three here, congratulations on not making it easy for us.

However, that being said, here are the picks of the litter.

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3rd Place

‘Once’ by Kathryn Roberts

I was a replacement, stick-figure substitute
for full-bodied flesh and bone,
a tangle-memory of brown curls and smiles
too wide for me to mimic. She echoed
through your house like an EKG,
mapping where I beat in relation to her,
where my heart stuttered
when you asked me if we’d ever have
a script of things we said
so often we forgot why.

Where my breath caught, spikes
in conversation that wound itself back
to comparisons. Me to her, mostly;
you to him. I still wash myself
with plain soap and wait for the suds to rinse
to clear, the swirled drain to empty
as I shake the water from my bare skin, shimmy
off the droplets and towel myself
across your floor.