Three days of avoiding the shops

half-dreaming of the anchovies I so desperately want
yet the depth of their flavour not
matching this shallowness, translating even
into death. For three days I ate only
wafers from the train station. Puffed with air
I lay in bed amassing
dust on duvets, staging
my own levitation. You know why I
avoided anchovies.
The tingle of feet in an ice
cold bed is finally enough to get me out
at dusk, all shabby chic
sludge in gutters. By the poster wall I
pour my gaze into
the hand of a viola player. It flutters
like something else.
What an ice
world. Why do anything
at all.

Relating to old town

No more shrinking away from Biedronka Supermarkets,
Irish Pubs, buds woven on hairbands to herald fake spring,
horses shackled to carts, their pain unreal like marzipan.
No more shrinking toward a set of cake box suburbs
with their plastic sheets of silence.
All because you arrived by Flixbus tonight,
let me see the way everything
lacks pain in you, spilled into the ink of my city. All the
time you now give me hangs over us like a prosthetic
sky.

Klub Hotelowy

One of us kept talking about how
the ceiling looked like tentacles, covered in craters
like something on a fish
counter. Another kept going
on about how the upper floors of this hotel
are uninhabited, warning even that they
are falling down. And by the door,
by the window, the hotel kept on smiling,
allowing its stomach tissue to be sat on,
a million skeletal bodies dancing their death dance in
too-small sunglasses, everyone choking on their own
hurtling bodies, their own spinning limbs,
a red, inflamed kind of blindness, too fast for itself.

Liv Aldridge is a poet from Sweden. She is pursuing a literature degree in the North of England but is living in Kraków for a year. Her work has been published in Ink Sweat & Tears and Carmen et Error and her music reviews appear in NARC. You can find her on Twitter @liv_aldridge.