Only by bringing it home
could she get its measure.

How this was done
she doesn’t remember.

She must have been drunk.
Now her favourite hunk of millstone grit

pulled from the river’s bed
vested in moss and white oxalis

has swallowed the room
land-grabbed most of the carpet.

Her children inch round this cuckoo’s egg,
listen to floorboards starting to give.

*

Taken from the anthology The Footing, published by Longbarrow Press.