With all her worldy love she did him endow,
gave the cushion of her stomach, the bed of her thighs
for him to lie upon. Her embrace was a handstitched quilt
pieced over years, patterned with the surplus

of shared lives: diamonds snipped
from homemade dresses,
shirt and curtain hems
remnants trimmed, sewn of the quiet hour.

In exchange he swore fidelity
to an earlier love, denying daily,
hourly meetings from which he returned
with the cling of yeasty perfumes adulterous on his skin.

Midnight caught him raddled, glaze-eyed
ravaged by his nymphomanical mistress,
the caked trace of red wine lipsticked over
the sagging mouth slurring the joke of denial.

Curtain and quilt bore the fray.
No longer blazed colours
to hold back the night
or the slide into debt which he labelled

her paranoia.
She took a second job, unpaid detective
policing his game, wore armour
to exercise damage limitation.

The elusive nature of crime made her doubt
her sanity, though she detected
all forms of evidence: the empties, empty wallet;
apprehended the violence of hangovers

and a thousand times caught him red-handed
caressing the metal and glass of his mistress'
neck; mouth kissed wet - and still
he denied the affair claiming blame if any

lay with her for the black of her eyes, the hag
of her voice; for the bed of her body turned to rock.
So by way of protection she transformed herself
to the shape of a bottle, the rip of a can-pull,

felt him slake measure for measure
the flow of her life and still he thirsted for more -
but by then his credit was dry.
There was nothing left to be drunk.

Helen Jayne Gunn

The tea chest where you stored those
six hundred and sixty-six empty beer bottles
intending to brew your own the day a let-up
occurred in your punishing schedule of
inebriation have been colonised

by snails. An entire snail nation procreating
in and around the uneven decks of
lasciviously shaped vessels, glueing themselves
into snail-sized bottle necks hoping to squeeze forth
into a better world of curved glass chambers.

For the sake of peace and quiet I've tried
to ignore this violation of shared
territory. But now some father snails have
discovered the alcoholic dregs which neither
the hoovering suction of your thirst or gravity

could ever quite drain from the empties. These
snails are turning into versions of you
bloated and unsafe, thinking only of the next
drop. I would not object but I can no longer
sleep for the silent screams of those other

snails who found life tough enough without drunks
to contend with. Apart from myself, it's the barefoot
snail children I feel sorry for and their temperate
grandparents handing over pension money to
feckless offspring who failed to get a grip.

Helen Jayne Gunn