4 Poems by Sam Rose

Toast

Some days the smell of toast throws me back
five years. Today is one of those days.
Curtains open at 8am. A bad night’s sleep.
The prospect of another waking day with
nothing to do but nap. Anything remotely
stimulating takes too much effort. Waiting
for lunch time and visiting hours to break
up the day. Already wishing the day would end.
The brittle feel of crumbs. Strawberry jam. 

I’m sitting at my desk waiting for the moment
to pass. When the smell evaporates, when
the toast is devoured, I’m back in the room. 

Time Machine 

Life has turned you into a jumper
and not the knitted kind
but the kind of jumper
who jumps at the chance to pick up a knife
or miscount your dosage
and if I had known life was going to turn out this way
I would have told you never to grow up
but what good is a time machine now? 

Photography 

We had no camera so we made frames with our hands,
blinked to fire the shutter and held the picture
with faces squeezed shut,
gone from the world for those moments
as we tried to emblazon the image
onto the insides of our eyelids,
where it would hang for viewing with every blink,
its presence in every dream. 

Morn

Draped in white velvet capes,
rows of ivory trees adorned in flakes,
the treetops mirroring the sky’s soft glow -
a universe lit up peach-pink by a hidden sun. 

Stopping to capture the fleeting image,
I feel the cold of the morning echo
in the raspberry tips of my fingers. 

Bionote 

Sam Rose is a twenty-something writer living in England. By day she works in marketing and by night she writes poetry, studies for her creative writing masters degree, and is the editor of Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine. She lives with her partner and enjoys listening to music and travelling.