Single

            Oliver Carmichael

in the end I fear coming home
            to a single room
                                         empty
                           but for a chair laid on its back
            as if a wind —
            as if someone seeing something
                           through the window
                                         had suddenly stood up —

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Oliver Carmichael lives in County Durham. He is the winner of the 2024 Winchester Poetry Prize and the 2024 Aurora Prize for Writing. In 2025 he was shortlisted for Nine Arches’ Primers Volume 8 and was a finalist in Only Poems’ inaugural Bob Hicok Poetry Fellowship.