Drill

Abandon your experiments. But how? And why? Is this a five second warning – leave
everything and run? Stop. It is not clear how to abandon your experiments; the body has a
range of measures to prevent your doing this, and the spirit’s an experiment unto itself. What
an awkward phrase – unto itself. The spirit moves more easily than that. The spirit is as
mobile as an itch. As long as it is, it is like an experiment. So there.

…

Nuala Watt’s poems have appeared on BBC Radio 3 and in anthologies including  Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press 2017)  and A Year of Scottish Poems (Macmillan 2018) 

Girl Without A Pearl Earring.

She took them off to sleep.
Or did Vermeer insist

she left them in the realm
of oils and spirits?

Though it’s the same smell
as my mother’s workroom

Vermeer did not paint me.

Please never say, to me,
woman with disabilities.

They are not jewels.
I cannot put them down.

…

Nuala Watt’s poems have appeared on BBC Radio 3 and in anthologies including  Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press 2017)  and A Year of Scottish Poems (Macmillan 2018)