FREE VERSE Poem: The Love of My Life Has Gone, by Abby Pullan

I don’t believe in God but I pray to shampoo bottles like rosaries made of plastic and despair.

The love of my life has gone. I told him so. He smiled like a guillotine falling in slow motion.

Day one: I wash you out with water hot as molten copper, the bottle heavy as a collapsed star in my trembling constellation of callused fingers.

Day fourteen: half empty, a dried hourglass where time bleeds backwards into the drain like liquid archaeology.

Day thirty: I pour the last into a candle’s hungry mouth and strike a match like lightning divorcing from the sky.

You burn strawberry-sweet, smoke rising like prayers, a crematorium of memory.

Your pillow exhales ghosts thick as opium dreams.

I sleep with my face pressed into cotton that tastes like the underside of thunder.

I find your sock behind the radiator—

a small suicide note written in wool and abandonment.

The receipt crumples in my coat: £47.83, our last supper itemised like evidence at love’s autopsy.

Strawberries

New shampoo, alien scent.

Each wash feels like drowning the last cathedral in an ocean of amnesia, like baptising myself in the wrong god’s tears.

Did he cry for me?

I can’t remember if your eyes were amber or autumn dying, if your laugh sounded like glass breaking beautifully or wind through cemetery gates.

Then:

the 8:15 train, a metal serpent swallowing distance. You, three seats away, still breathing in colours I’ve forgotten how to see.

I touch my scalp—

hair like wheat after wildfire—

and smell strawberries burning, remember the candle ceremony…

how I thought flame could divorce us from gravity.

But here you are, turning pages like prayer wheels, alive as an opened wound,

whilst I’ve been measuring grief in millilitres, drowning in bottles that hold more than

soap—