Where the Weight Catches by Claire Lynn

Where the Weight Catches In the Fat Giraffe shop you find a wooden bucket labelled South China, Antique and you want to laugh: £45 for a night-soil bucket! But you hook a finger into the notch in the handle where the weight catches, add a similar bucket, hang them from either end of a split bamboo pole…   … for you know the man whose bucket this is: how he shrugs the pole round the back of his neck when one shoulder aches. You know the broad, oiled douli he wears against sun and rain, the notch in his front tooth where he cracks sunflower seeds. At bedtime, you know he washed his face and feet in separate bowls, drying them on the wrung-out washcloths. In the morning, how his bristly pig lumbers to the door for breakfast. You’ve tasted his oranges, eaten his rice, slept behind the mosquitoed curtains of his bed.   Set down his bucket in the Fat Giraffe shop, the slosh of disturbed memory lapping back to a still round mirror. The ache in your shoulder is the weight of what’s lost. - Claire Lynn taught English with VSO in China from 1988-90.  She now lives in Hexham, Northumberland and teaches English and Creative Writing around the county.  Her poems have been published in the Bridport Prize anthology (1999),  the Ver Prize anthology (2017), Virago anthology The Nerve, The Independent newspaper, and various magazines including Smiths Knoll, Writing Women, Other Poetry and Dream Catcher.  Her reviews of Chinese literature have appeared in London Magazine.  “Where the Weight Catches” was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2017.