There is a peacefulness to this pain,

A familiar comfort to the tightness of my chest, reminiscent of childhood, where,

In fevered dreams something to grasp

became nothing at all

A black mirror held up to my white face

This room - a womb of December

The month I was born with shards of ice whiter than I,

That stick in my chest, my throat

So different to my summer sicknesses

Sticky skin and nut-brown all over

Fever higher than the sun in a sky I see only through a window

Where vegetables grow in lines

And my cat breaks the neck of a baby bird, perhaps, while I slip, and sleep

between what is and what isn’t

In my room that is now both bigger and smaller than I can bear

In the kitchen, my Nana makes oxtail soup from the bones of last night's dinner

that I eat with a spoon so big it stretches the corners of my mouth

And I eat squares of thick buttered white bread that came in a white paper bag from the back of a bakery truck

I drink with a straw from the glass bottle of lemonade she bought from the milk-man in his Dairy Crest float

who tips his flat tweed cap to her blue floral dress

While I lay on the sofa, louder when I breathe than when I speak or think

the wheeze and scream and rattle

The tightness that comes

So tight in my chest that

every time I think

I might die,

(and even though I never do)

There is still the gasp, the desperate sob,

the heat,

the sweat,

the coughing until my throat tears

and bleeds the same colour red

as my Christmas stocking