Angela Arnold lives in North Wales and is also an artist, a creative gardener and an environmental campaigner. Her poems have appeared in print magazines, anthologies and online, in the UK and elsewhere. Collection In|Between: ‘inner landscapes’ and relationships (Stairwell Books, 2023). She enjoys language/s and is currently learning Welsh.

Twenty Odd Uses of Furniture in a New Home

Could place that old bereavement (bit stale now)
flat against the wall, dead centre.
Shove the dodgy old jealousy of a sofa further
along from the radiator – more heat always needed
over here: keep it airy,
this clutch of occasional tables
(each with its own curvaceous legs of fury,
envy, deceit, touch of revenge,
plus a top of lasting shock).

The larger table – labelled trauma –
best there, centre stage? Enough room
just in case it blows: limbs scattered, injuring
innocent mirrors and vases,
those minor grievances.

And that’s only what they call the family room.
There are stairs, creaking already with recorded hurt.
There are bedrooms. Let’s not go there. 
So long as everything is assigned its place,
has room to breathe its truth
silently, stiffly.

But now where, in amongst all this,
to put the small baskets of loving, woven with endless
care, often, quietly? And in which, in what container
to hold the ‘measure of devotion’ never
measured in any such sense – where now
to lay out that banquet, remembering
the unstiff, unwooden, the uncounted, unbanked
in official ways, all the unregarded little helpful gestures.
Scatters of life with never an epitaph.