Devour Everything by Sarah Stewart contains poetry that celebrates all that life can throw at us and how we make it through – the mundane made heroic and sacred. Enjoy this sample from this defiant collection.

Devour Everything
By Sarah Stewart
Published by Tapsalteerie

Illusory

‘Behind the illusion of everyday life lies the reality of dreams.’
– Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo

In the way that you turn a corner on to a street
you knew when young and catch your breath:
its dimensions calcified, unchanged

in the way that a stuck door creaks open
to reveal a garden full of honeysuckle,
sheened with snail-slime, netted with cobwebs

in the way that orderly rooms, scrubbed clean,
lose their patina of interesting dirt –
watermarks, spilled ash, candlewax, bluebottles

in the way that your fingers will find the chord
on a piano, knowing the claw-stretch
years without playing

in the way that the moon will sequester and release
a view of spires and slates
on a bed of staggered indigo

in the way that a man walks out of smoking ruins
clutching his workbag, still wearing
sameshoes samesuit samecoat as this morning –

in the way that you are falling
through barred cloud, streaked bronze,
dropping like a stone

in the way that we are animals
and our bodies remember things.

Second-Hand Dress

i

I surmise
by the tight bodice
the original owner was narrower than me.
Athletic? Played tennis?

It’s an odd colour:
off yellow? Gold-adjacent? Ugly,
but appealing in its vagueness.

Washed twice, it still offers
a hint of musk; violets
sharpening in the heat.

It asks me, constantly,
with every swish of the fabric
who do you think you are?

ii

A confusion of mirrors, prisms.
I watch from a rising escalator:
a shopgirl yawns, then disappears.

Vanishing lines of mannequins
lipstick bullets in rows:
Strip Me Down, Men Love Mystery.

The dress too tight across my ribs.
Butterscotch, that’s the colour.
Mouthful of sweetness, sweetheart.

Japanese Wind Telephone
for Peter

When you asked me for a love poem
I told you about a glass booth

containing one object,
a disconnected rotary phone:

black, shiny as whale-belly
from which the grieving

can dial the numbers
of their lost ones, speak

to the listening dead.
I promised

that after you were gone,
I would keep telling you things:

how our children are growing;
how the blown apple blossom

fills the gutter
outside our house;

how our neighbours
still make love so loudly

and when they wake me
I find I have reached again

for your hand.

Sweetheart

I want to make you good things.
To simmer and fold
until cream and sugar clot
into caramel; to roll and unmould
dainty madeleines or macarons.
It’s no use. I’m better at pickles,
ribbons of courgette cut and plunged
into vinegar. Show me love,
and I’ll show you hands smeared
with vermillion chilli, crushed garlic,
splinters of ginger
under every fingernail.

Devour Everything by Sarah Stewart is published by Tapsalteerie, priced £12.00.