for Tara
When I sleep, she still exists.
Her face peach-bright
and more than just a pinch of skin.
My friend is a tattooed hologram who hugs
me tight and tells me she’s glad to see me
and how she’s sorry I can’t be a bridesmaid
as her wedding won’t be going ahead.
I won’t tell her when she left he changed his mind.
Most people do, when you go the way she did.
And she says she can’t wait for my wedding,
her corset is laced and her boots are shined.
She’s bringing her favourite lover, a leather-and-tartan
skirted sprite, curved in at the waist and out at the hip;
this one makes her feel more alive than ever.
I’ve been here all this time, she says, as music
blasts through black-light clouds – not a harp in sight –
and tells me how I’d love her new friends
because they are absolute angels.
First published at Clear Poetry.
Kate Garrett is the founding editor of Three Drops from a Cauldron and Picaroon Poetry, and her own work can be found here and there – most recently in Dying Dahlia Review, Riggwelter, Hobo Camp Review, and The Literary Hatchet. Her latest poetry chapbook You’ve never seen a doomsday like it was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2017, and the next, Losing interest in the sound of petrichor, will be published by The Black Light Engine Room Press in early 2018. She grew up in rural southern Ohio, but moved to the UK in 1999, where she still lives in Sheffield with her husband, 4.5 children, and a sleepy cat.
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