A Poem by Joe Carrick-Varty

Home Alone Trying Not to Eat

in order to make my problems small
i take the chocolate brownie to the middle
of a field in the middle of the night
in the middle of the hottest summer
in the UK on record where the grass
tells me it has in fact never been counted
where the sky tells me it has in fact
never been to Tenerife that’s a different
sky altogether over there and i feel
completely in control of my life
for half an hour swallowing tiny bites
of brownie in the middle of a field
the uncountable grass beneath
the immovable sky

Joe Carrick-Varty is a British-Irish poet, writer, and founding editor of bath magg. His work has appeared in New Statesman, Granta, and POETRY. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2022. His debut collection is More Sky (Carcanet).