POETRY | New Year's Eve

January 2026. It's hot and the world is...sore. Visibly bruised even in the confetti half light of replayed televised fireworks. I try to lean into normal things and the absurd politness of the act feels wrong. The world of now is a friend with a black eye everyone in the room sees and no-one wants to acknowledge.

Every day by nature is a new creature, hours unwritten and with opportunity present for it to be different than the one before. I'm sitting in my kitchen, knowing all of these things are objectively true. Knowing that practical normality these days is all acting to some degree. Equally true though is that today - not everyday, but definitely today - I'm paralysed, here with my hands around a coffee cup that's gone cold and fused to the timber chair in the quiet of my house.

The clock ticks on the wall. I don't know it yet but the battery is dying.

I don't even realise there's a poem to be written until its upon me. My palms press against the porcelain. I have nowhere else to be. I flick open my notes app as I would even if I had a thousand places to be, and listen as the lines become heartbeats. Steady, pulsing...unfiltered. God. When had I forgotten the ability of words to bleed? This is one of many images that come as the idea unfurls.

The poem, like the world, can be anything it wants.

Today it chose to be a wound.

I’m trying

to wake in the morning

Not because I want to or

to begin again

but

as though my ribs are windows.

My heart’s a bird that

doesn’t believe

in day-based resolutions anymore -

   Life only happens on time,

                            not on schedule.

It’s just that

On New Years Eve,

With great love,

a friend wished me life like

                                   a crowbar.

The kind to pry a chest open, she said,

to let more love in.

My fingers spread like jaws,

like fissures in a dam wall,

Hovering over neon in my kitchen,

A being forked in quiet lightning.

How do I tell my friend, I think,

Attempting to release

the iron marrow clasp of my sternum

to let the gilt

silver sprinkler breeze through,

It is not

what rushes in,

About what comes

at the rocks of whatever I am now.

The waves and I

are constant at each other.

What it is

is when I am, instead,

the sea

In a world made of shores that say

“No thank you,

But long as you’re here,

wash my shells clean while you’re out.

Take the sharpness I give you,

In your depths

And in your darkness

Clean out what used to be and

make the edges soft.

Could you just?

Because I have things to do

And I am the beach, not you;

I am where the light goes.

Be a good tide,

If you’re really love

Then you’d let the ones who are meant to,

      who are not you,

put these gentled treasures I picked to push back,

in someone else’s hands.

You’ll show some grace -

Know it’s not my fault,

I have no voice to correct

if they assume I did it all.”

How do I tell my friend

what it is

when window becomes driftwood.

That I became something in the dark, too.

I’m an ocean hunting the meal of something just,

knocking

at weak glass,

Here to collect.

Crowbar breaking cages

Holding sharks I did not ask for,

And God help me, I will tap now til the illusion

                                                           cracks.

                                      © Erin Brown 2026