Up the Staircase: Gillian Prew

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The Gnawing Sorrow

this is me this
gnawing sorrow
hunched under hair
loosely bound in skin
splitting from the moans
of sighing bones osteoporosing
faintly but with dignity

and I sit

on a pile of
coffee-stained paperbacks
and birdword notebooks
containing flapping poems
caged
in softbound covers

and beneath those slack
breasts thread upon thread
of wilfulness spun to
tie my heart together
while lungs garrotted by despair
have lost
three-quarters of breath

©Gillian Prew

Gillian Prew is 41 and lives in Scotland with her two children. She is a philosophy graduate who has taken to poetry because she can't get her novel finished. Her themes include aging, solitude, silence, memory, love and longing.