I want red tulips like yours, it is winter here too.

The city is a morgue. Heavy cloaks of snow cover corpses:

closed schools, frozen cars, desolate playgrounds.

I can no longer differentiate day from night –

white night is white day is white sky is white

road is white door is white wall is white floor.

In here, it is not an occasion when I collapse

at reception. There are no weeping violins.

The doctor laughs as he injects me:

“We should hide the paracetamol from you girls.”

Behind the curtain, the girl in the next A&E bay swears.

Her veins are inconvenient. This is not her first time,

unlike mine. My twenty-four hours in bed are precautionary.

I have no clothes for tomorrow, no toothbrush,

no phone charger. I lie in my coat under a scratchy blanket.

At the end of the ward, a frail, old woman rises

from her bed and hovers in a ghostly nightgown.

She calls hoarsely for her mother. She wants

the toilet, but she does not know the way there.

Morning. I wipe away hair spit-stuck to my lips.

Time yawns on. I pick at a rubbery chicken sliver for lunch.

There is a middle-aged woman in the bed next to me,

her arm in a cast, a silly mishap dear.

Her children gift her cards. Her friends gift her chocolates.

I lie in penance. The shrink makes me sit

and think hard about what I’ve done. I worry,

what if she can smell the sweat from last night’s nightmare?

I think about the twenty-something woman in Bed Six

with a bruised face. She smashed up chairs and wailed for hours,

because she wanted lipstick, Vaseline, anything to soften her lips,

because her man was coming soon, and he couldn’t kiss her like this.

Afternoon. I say the right things and get release.

As I walk home through the snow, I begin planning my finale.

I’m nineteen. My hair is knotted. My teeth have a shiny film.

In the shower, I peel a forgotten ECG pad from my ankle.

I scratch away at the grey, sticky fuzz. Numb

to how the soap stings within the cuts on my skin.

Evening. I go to Tesco Express and buy wine and scissors,

but I want red tulips, their endless imagery, each red bud

a victory horn, each red petal a medal for each woman.

I want red tulips, to see their cut thumbs sticking

out of the snow. I want red tulips, their beautiful, blooming,

bloody hyperbole, but this is not beauty.

I am not poetry.