Poem of the Week: 'Project for Scissors, Paper and an Egg' by Martha Sprackland
Posted by the Bookshop
Martha Sprackland's debut collection, Citadel (Pavilion Press), has just been published & is a real piece of kit. Here's a poem from it to whet your appetite both for it and for eggs.
Project for Scissors, Paper and an Egg
A ream of printer paper is a road
and scissors run along it like a racer.
Chainsaw-bifurcated tree
with fibrous heart.
She had escrituras, a little writing desk,
but she is erased from the archives. Where is Juana?
She wants to glue back together
the white halves of her breakfast eggshell
but can’t match the crown-points
and the edge is too fine –
there is no fixing it. The breakfast-room is dingy
so she brings in a roll of wallpaper
a dual-carriageway, roadside trees blurring
in the chew of the pulping machine
to make more paper for the hungry scissors,
and a second boiled egg for Juana to eat
whilst snipping up a pile of letters and poems
between resolute and yellow bites.
