is in the details. She pictures him there,
leering like a drunken lech at the bar,
sizing her up the way a cuckoo eyes a nest.
She scoots her chair so far back
from the table that it’s an island drifting
apart from an archipelago.
Her sanitiser-parched hands reach
towards her glass as she ponders if it’s safe
to drink: how many people have held it
before her, left greasy thumbprints or—
worse—wet half-moons around the rim?
Her fingers snap back to her lap
like a released tape measure, resume shredding
little pieces of themselves. A sharp opiate.
Someone is talking about clearing
their late mother’s house but her mind
spider-weaves from bar to hands to glass:
she carried it to the table, and so bears its taint
on her downturned palm and in the gulleys
of her finger joints, and hasn’t she fiddled
with her earring since, adjusted her top,
peeled away the skin around her nail
like a sticky satsuma? So many ways
for disgrace to enter. She is her own stain,
the fluids left behind when a body rots.
She counts the seconds between the coughs
of the man behind her, calculates and recalculates
the distance between him and her
and all the while nods along and shreds
and thirsts until OCD tells her a fresh drink
still in the bottle might be safer.
