The Pygmy Giant

by Ray Morgan

All I could see
was a tear in the wallpaper,
one layer of onion skin ripped away
baring the life of some other house.

A thousand other lives
and smells
and conversations
held in one layer of paper,
a treasure map of the past.

I became obsessed with
scratching off
this outer, gaudy padded wallpaper
with bitten-down fingernails
plugged with glue and paste.

I needed the other life;
if I could surround myself
with somebody else’s taste
I would be in another world,
not the one you pasted up for us.

I scored holes and
made an atlas of two worlds:
one hopeful and holding stories
and one mine,
a lonely bowl.

You never came to see me
and I waited
in my new old wallpapered room,
a crouched hamster
on a bed of flaked paper
and forgotten time.

Ray Morgan is 24 and from Southend-on-Sea. She co-runs an arts organisation called ‘Sundown’ that specialises in spoken word events.