single window

Daniel Sluman

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781913437244
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Daniel Sluman's third collection, single window is a hybrid memoir of poetry and images.

One an amputee with chronic pain, the other suffering from Crohn's Disease and Fibromyalgia, Daniel Sluman and his wife Emily found the year of 2016 almost untenable. Unable to safely navigate the stairs to bed, they spent 24 hours a day together on their sofa, isolated from society except for a single window, where they watched the world moving around them.

single window is an incomparable, uncompromising and starkly-realised sequence of poems in the form of a journal, which bear witness to the loneliness and fear experienced by disabled people living in Tory Britain. Through a precise, hyper-confessional fusion of poetry and photography, this book details the realities of disabled lives, exploring intimacy and unconditional love as well as isolation and confinement, and documenting a world that many people otherwise never see.

spring

your bottom lip sweet with red bull

the pale crease of your collarbone

lengthening in half-light

i pour these memories into paper

as best as i can

& gather you in my arms

to drink each freckle

before we sleep deep in that dark

where my shame sits

in the corner

like my father did

when i was thin as a melon rind with the chemo

learning that the body

is warm milk

& i couldn’t sleep

without knowing he was there

just like i can’t sleep now

watching my breath shake

each hair

on your neck

~

pain spreads / like piss

pushing through / the creases /

of your jeans / like a moment

remembered / like an idea /

stiffening into clarity

~

one of us is always appearing

to the other

in a scribbled haze of cigarette smoke

used pill-packets spread

like sunlight over the sofa

5mg of diazepam flickering

through my body like rain

in your hand

a bloody scrap of tissue

like a burst party balloon

as you fall asleep on the toilet

the calendar on my phone empties itself

& i tell you it’s getting better

but maybe that’s just something

people like us say

to stop things falling apart

how we drag ourselves

from week to week

& the world carries the beautiful

like the room carries the light

from the window

~

~

the toilet paper tears in your fist

a curl of blood threads

down the side of the basin

& i can hear your heart straining

from the other side of the door

sat amidst the darkness & lint

the corpses of spiders stiffened inwards

like tiny fists

& the only light is cast

through the gaps in the doorframe

fine lines of gold gouged into the floor

as you wait for this flare to blur

you picture the beautiful

all over the world

skin glistening

in the bath as they shave themselves

to a vapour

leafing glossy magazines

& filling prayers

with a thankfulness pitched

against the horror of lives like ours

the skirting boards choked with dust

the late-night tv

preaching its call for wholeness

from the empty lounge

in a minute you’ll pull your fingers

from the pockets of your gown

& rest your weight against my arm

& we’ll shuffle our way to bed

one step at a time

~

~

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• autumn
• winter
• spring
• summer
• Image Descriptions
• About the author