Iona Lee
There was this woman who would
come into the bookshop where I used
to work, and we would talk, and eventually
became something like friends – though
I couldn’t tell you anything about her now,
just that she was an artist, and had a studied
melancholia about her. She told me
that she kept many lovers, and also
that she had photographed every bed
she’d ever slept in. I remember wondering –
When would you start a project like that?
At any point in my life I would have felt
it was already too late.
Once, travelling to a gig
in some far flung corner of the country,
I was given a lift by a festival volunteer.
I used to be an interrogator in the army,
he said, moments after I got into his car.
I could find out everything there is to know
about you, if I wanted. For the next two hours,
I didn’t say a word, I just stared at the road
ahead as he told me about his wife,
and how they’d met, about his kids
who were all grown up now,
about his tours of Iraq.
I’ve never kept a diary.
Not out of principle, I’m just
too aware of an audience.
I don’t remember the bed I slept in
that night, or how many beds ago it was,
or who drove me home in the morning.
I do wish that I had kept more lovers,
for the glamour of the sentence alone, but
I think that life happened to somebody else.
I’ve got some bad stories. Sometimes
I think maybe I should write them down,
but then I think, Why – for who?
Iona Lee is a writer whose work encompasses poetry, visual art, music and live performance. Her debut collection, Anamnesis, won the Somerset Maugham Award. In 2024 she published What I Love About A Cloud Is Its Unpredictability, a collection of visual and concrete poetry.
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