Whistling as a Weapon
When passing the edges of town, where suburbia melted into
grey endlessness, I whistled at the train tunnels and the railway bridge
the dark gathered like lapping water, my voice bobbing on the surface like a rubber duck.
Alone in the kitchen after dark, for a glass of water
whistling dry-throated into the places where blue and black washed the familiar walls
and outside the window the world was half-asleep.
On a shortcut across scrubby wasteland, the grass arrowed sharply with rats
heavy with moths and the soft tick of crickets, the white earth bone-dust
of dried mud in late summer, and I whistled a pop song that the field wouldn’t know.
Walking home, past the endless echo of doppelgänger houses, wrapped in uncanny shades of midnight. I was drunk when I started but I wasn’t drunk now. My lipstick cracked as I whistled
and from someone’s overgrown back garden an invisible something whistled back to me.
Daisy Harris
Featuring a beautiful picture by the ever-talented Emily Worms. Find more of her work here: https://www.instagram.com/emily.worms/
Daisy Harris Poetry 