Chloe Elliott
Love’s Worn Circuit
The last time we spoke you handed over two
orange plastic bags filled with groceries. Inside one
of them was a Tupperware filled with Turkish
delight, mostly apple and lemon, and three large
cubes of tangerine. In the other was soup that I
hoped to be carrot and ginger. Everyone said how
beautiful Malvern would be but then when we got
there it was a flat ridge of a hill dropping into
itself. We walked across the land, curving around
the reservoir and further into the British Camp.
The poplars were sick, taken with large scabs that
swelled and swallowed up their trunks. We kept
walking as if nursing a stain under our clothes.
Nothing changed. We rode the corrugations:
perseverance, jubilee, hangman. We didn’t change,
never drank from a dolphin’s head, never
submitted to a bergamot votive, didn’t grow to
love each other or the children any more like the
OS promised. An older couple overtook us,
a husband gruffed and empathically strode past
his wife as she struggled with a purple raincoat.
I microwaved the soup and found it was red pepper.
I heated it until it bubbled and the sides curled up
around the edges, turning into a paste like tapenade.
I found the odd piece of ginger, folding the slivers in
my mouth as if strings of horsehair. We hadn’t
spoken for a month and then we went to Worcester.
You texted. I’m not doing this without you.
I remembered the lobsters in our neighbour’s
restaurant, sat in a cage without a lid. Every time
one tried to escape the others would pull and drag,
tussling with the animal’s black shell until it
crackled back in. At dinner, the meat arrived like a
plate of broken blood vessels. I don’t understand
what you’re trying to do. What do you need to give
me? Our footsteps started to conjoin, syncing over
the acid grassland until I could hear my mother’s
voice, a grey vein turning glossy blue. I’m trying to
do anything. There isn’t an agenda here. Anthony,
the woman said from behind. I watched the redstart,
envious of the lightness in its body, its own name
like a cherry in its beak.
CHLOE ELLIOTT is a winner of the 2022 New Poets Prize. Her writing features in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Magma and The North. Her pamphlet, Encyclopaedia, is published with Smith|Doorstop, and her micro chapbook DREAMSIMULATION is forthcoming with Carmen et Error.