soap

I stood & cried at the kitchen sink today.
I stood & blinked away my salt-brine drops,
sunshine saccharine marigolds fleshing
confetti soapsuds into a slippery existence.

I sat on the kitchen floor & wept for the exhaustion of
my hope.
for the women wearing squeaking smiles that stick
pearlescent oil slick to their soap scum mouths,
suffocating beneath the weight of
their sadness.

I descend into the corporeal & I
howl from the ground as I
scrape the knife across my scarlet soft and
spew forth
clots of bile.

Do I defile?

No.
You asked for this.

do not tell me that emotion does not belong
in my body & its language
when it is you who would demand the
performance of my pain
over & again
just to validate its existence.

so take my body in all its blood
& smear a smile across my skin.
my substance is paper thin
& if all you want is the surface without subjectivity, then I will
paint myself into
mosaic being.

the suds have dried
leaving barely anything behind.

Alice Carlill is a London-based dramaturg, script supervisor, poet and performer. As a script writer, reader and supervisor, she has worked with Theatre503, Finborough Theatre, Katzpace, The Delta Collective and Big Broad Productions, and has performed her spoken word/poetry at venues including Watford Palace Theatre and Finborough Arms. She is collaborating with The Actor’s Box on performance-poetry workshops, devising a performance on queerness and liminality, and studying for her MA at Goldsmiths. She can otherwise be found walking her six dogs somewhere.