Extracts from THE FIG BOOK

MEAT

 She thought of all the Bobs who had laid her down in parks or in closets or in their basement waterbeds, and she recalled the void of delight in those moments. She had been no brook, no font to them. She had been a brook to her friends, for them she could access delight with ease and truthiness, but not for these Bobs. She had wanted, it was true, to be desired by them, but hadn’t wanted to be laid down and handled. She wanted to lay herself down, fulsome in delight, and for them to lay beside her, in the radius of it, and for the touching to happen with ease and magnetism and joy.

She supposed it wasn’t their fault, exactly. But why was she always led to the park, to the closet, or to the bed, when there was no one else around? No community or group to see and affirm their togetherness. It had always taken place in hiding, and this had made her feel wrong, and in a hole of wrongness there was no way to access delight.

One thing about Fiancé Bob was that he wanted the world to see them together. The thing that they had, he wanted to show it off. You’re perfect for me, he said. You tick all the boxes.

GLASS

 Sometimes a storm would take hold of her, a storm borne of blindness. What had Fiancé Bob done with his eyes? Were they so clouded with disregard, like a film on the eyes of an aged chihuahua, that he could not see the slime layer pot-rice had formed on the bottom of the sink, could not see that a book would be forever smirched if it was placed among the crumbs and smears on the coffee table? Were the periwinkle socks laying limp and grubbied on the bathroom floor for days so invisible? Who among the seeing humans of the world can for so long ignore the wavelength of periwinkle?

These moods sent her into a froth of furious, martyred dishwashing, such that she would find herself, an hour later with gloves on, wiping crescent moons of soy sauce from the high shelf that held the vinegars, as if a terrible overreach of jif and responsibility was the only redress for the blindness of the world.

Fiancé Bob would emerge blinking from his slouch container where he had been doing ‘soft research’ and pour himself a glass of orange juice. What are you doing, he would say.

Joan Fleming is the author of the verse novel Song of Less (Cordite Books), the poetry collections Failed Love Poems and The Same as Yes  (THWUP), and the chapbooks Two Dreams In Which Things Are Taken (DUETS) and Some People's Favourites (Desperate Literature).