This selection from a longer poem by Lotte L.S. conjures a domestic scene, emerging out of memory. A home’s tattered, broken and neglected objects accumulate, and as they do, the demands of these objects become apparent. A mess is not inert. Dirty dishes make demands. The home here is not a place of safety or comfort but a site of labor. Yet there is no strike — only escape. Selected by Anne Boyer
From “This Energy Wasted by Flight —”
By Lotte L.S.
But what do I remember?
The disorderly shelves, dust gathering at the edges
of a photograph, broken carrier bag,
a sink full of dishes
smirking in the civil twilight.
Where to strike when work is home?
A persistent little voice that says,
get out, get out —
Anne Boyer is a poet and an essayist. Her memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Lotte L.S. is a poet living in Great Yarmouth, a town on England’s far eastern coast. Her writing includes a pamphlet with Tripwire titled “A town, three cities, a fig, a riot, two blue hyacinths, three beginnings, five letters, a ‘death,’ two solitudes, façades, four loose dogs, …” translations of the Moroccan poet and Marxist feminist Saïda Menebhi and shorter self-published pamphlets of poetry like “untitled (Iceland).” “THIS ENERGY WASTED BY FLIGHT —” is out now with Pamenar Press, accompanied by a German translation by the poet and translator Lotta Thiessen.
