Rachel Burns
It’s no joke. I’m still drunk.
Slicing a sack of onions at 7 a.m. with a hangover.
The dinner ladies hiss,
don’t let Cook see you minging.
By lunchtime, my skull feels like a cracked egg.
The kids a year above
wolf whistle me in the dinner queue.
I slop mince & onion onto their dinner trays.
Last night was Disco night.
We drank cider & black with Mam’s happy pills,
headbanged to Whole Lotta Rosie.
Kat hates school,
jumps into cars full of strangers.
Fucks anyone:
steals a man’s half-drunk pint
from under his nose,
gets into fight after fight.
Kat sits on the bench outside my house,
with her new baby.
Mam stares out of the bay window,
purses her lips, look at the state of that,
you’d think she was playing with her doll.
Rachel Burns is published in magazines including The Friday Poem, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Butcher’s Dog, The Rialto and Magma. She came second in The Julian Lennon Prize for Poetry 2021 and was long listed in The National Poetry Competition 2021.
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