Letters from Lockdown is a series of three poems that take the form of letters to friends, lovers and concepts (hardly distinct categories) written from within quarantine. They contained themes of nebulous definitions of love and affection, the boundaries between language and bodies, and the dissolving of labels around artists, scientists, friends, lovers, concepts and personhood. These works are informed by lenses of queerness, neuro divergence and chronic pain.

Letter to a Friend

My Darling,

The last time I saw you, you made a joke. Something riffing off Love in the Time of Cholera, but that might have been me. I find our conversations run together—both when we sit (more than side by side, on other people’s sofas, leg locked over leg), and later on, when I am X miles away—they run together further still. I couldn’t possibly count our separation in metric measures. What’s your postcode? I need it for a poem. Once I know how far away you are, I can delete that X and fill it in, two- no, now three- three lines above.

I send poems by Wendy Cope to everyone I know. My friend, a Doctor of Philosophy, messages to tell me he is making macaroni cheese. The cat has fallen asleep behind me in warm rustle of a bubble wrap bag. If you were here, you would smile and when I looked, you would pretend you had not smiled. Your replies are usually made by the handful, that is—a plate warmed in the oven, placed hesitantly upon my tired lap, a pot-plant brought up on the train accompanied by a kneecapped quip—you mean a great dill to me. I know, of course, and sprinkle your soft honesty over scrambled eggs for weeks to come.

You, among significant others, were meant to come and visit for our birthday. I’ve not celebrated it as mine since my parents’ separation. Since then it has always been ours. An achievement for an only child, unaccustomed to sharing. I think that was the first time we video called. I called because I knew it sounded bad enough that you would give me unconditional sympathy, but when you picked up, I let out all the words I had intended to perform without performance.

It feels tacky to write about the time we spent in hospital last April. You were there, you know, you brought the birthday draperies and appropriate grapes and such. I misread the machines and panicked, and you didn’t make a point of my relentless melodramas. There’s always been an awful lot you do not make a point of.

Sometimes when you don’t speak, I want to turn you into me. I want to make you bleed idiot words and need me. I’m glad you don’t. I’m more like you when I don’t drink. And you like me more when you do. That’s probably a lie but it looks good in a mirror.

I don’t know how your handfuls will work under house arrest. I send you photos from the heath. You send me photos of the potatoes growing on your balcony above the main road. In three weeks, the flat will have become a forest that wraps you up in pimento leaves and heaving parsley. Persimmons hang about your lips like light bulbs. I used to be jealous, but you cut that part away from me. Even in your sky garden, you don’t speak. The spreading coriander has vetoed all your puns and opportunistic euphemisms. I am X miles away and the creeping baby carrots have taken over your pots and pans. You cannot reply to my messages.

What’s your postcode? I need it for a poem. No touches, no gestures, no half-truth jokes allowed. How can you speak to me when it is almost our birthday and there are no more ways to say you mean a great… well. The space between my shoulder blades feels chronically untouched. I saw a bird today that you did not see.

Hunger diminishes my impulse control. I have resigned myself to sending this with all the kisses left in.

No expectation of a response.

Your X

Letter to an Astronaut

Dear Artie,

You always said you weren’t an artist. It’s something you state a lot. It’s almost how you introduce yourself. Hi, I’m Artie, I’m not an artist.

What was it you said in your last letter? How exciting that you will be mingling with editors and agents soon! You never hold back on the exclamation marks. I’m sorry I didn’t reply to your first letter. I’m sorry I didn’t reply to the next. This is my writer friend! you say, introducing me and I’ve got a cold thing all down my left arm because I know there is an empty space in the stack of letters you keep. What kind of writer friend am I? Afraid of exclamation marks and full to the brim with unwritten letters.

What’s your love language? You said it through the window, and I ran away for a week. How do I explain that I live with my friends, that I cannot fathom the difference between seeing and eating? I love and like in equal measures and all of those measures are miles. I’ve been very well behaved since the world ended. You watch me through the tiny eye in my phone as I make biscuits. I don’t think you’re meant to put eggs in. In they go. I can’t leave the washing up to your disparaging pixels now.

You’re a person who moves slowly, deliberately. Even when you cry it is with a purpose which I envy. You are a being born with an innate belief in gravity. You were the person who told me that gravity is a particle. I imagine it must be a very large particle because there is so much gravity around these days. It’s the sort of joke you’d shout about but I know the particles are small. I see where they go. They cling to you. The gravity swarms around your feet, your shiny black walking stick, the inner edges of your eyes. You’re in good company. It clings to the last light of the horizon too, dragging down the night.

We stood on your balcony and you laughed at how little I knew about the things we can’t see.

I’m not an artist.

You tell me how deep the ocean is.

I’m not an artist.

You pull out reams of diagrams. This is the raft we will sail away on when the sea levels sidle up to French kiss our carpets. You show me where the solar panels sit. How the allotment will be towed along behind.

I’m not an artist, here, let me show you the sky.

A week after my legs gave out and I made myself a demanding space in your bed, you met me by the canal to say you’d gotten your absent childhood vaccinations. Two people lacking in self-preservation instincts doing the Darwinian leg work for each other. I made you eat spaghetti, you let me have a room in which to be sober.

I imagine you sitting on a bed which is no longer yours. I hear your mother fussing off-camera. Something in me broils. Three pints of spinach isn’t normal, I tell you. I point at your adolescence - that is not a meal. I probably said I was sorry. I tell you about the time I ran away, and nobody noticed I was gone. It all becomes a mantra. Back and forth back and forth.

That wasn’t normal. I’m sorry.

We’ll be different from them.

Yes, we’ll be different from them.

We’ll be normal, we’ll eat spaghetti and only drink after 6pm.

We’ll write letters.

Back and forth back and forth.

Letter to sleep

Dear sleep,

There is something guilty in me when I write to you. I leave you uncapitalized, as if that will keep your hooks out of my eyes. I’ve never cheated on a lover, though other’s weak lovers have cheated with me. Turned me into a loose-fitting glove; into half-filled half pints; into the memory of white buddleia on a neighbour’s lawn: forbidden; blooming; swaying at the tip saying pick me, pick me.

Dearest sleep oh! The things I have done for you. I think I know why you follow me now. Follow me into waiting rooms, follow my hand as I hover over boxes, you link our fingers as I try to focus my eyes.

DO YOU FREQUENTLY EXPERIENCE UNUSUALLY LONG PERIODS OF FATIGUE?

YES_ NO_

You kiss my neck, yes.

We glide over fixed definitions of pain I have had ‘in the last week’. I am immune to weeks but not hours. Is atemporality a symptom of anything they can treat? You help me write it down. You sit beside me, slide into me slyly when the doctor looks away.

SHOULDER GIRDLE, LEFT_

Tick.

Dear sleep, we spent hours together the day my legs gave out. I toyed with you after the new medication but I came back eventually. Perhaps I was mistaken when I said I’ve never cheated. I would visit my first boyfriend with roses and an unstoppable tiredness. He’d get up to wash his hands and when he turned back I would have curled up into you. shameless.

The sun sets after eight o’clock now and I am becoming more loyal, like a dog too old to run away. I’m sorry for the way I ease into you. I can’t look my lovers in the face, but at least with you it’s alright to do it in the dark. sleep, do you mind that I fill my head with other men’s words? Do you listen? We’ve ‘eased in’ with a lot of Nabokov of late. Yes, I know. It surprised me too.

I look at you and I know that we are afraid of each other, and yet I cannot put you down. Now you are the dog, I see. Following, sitting by, now filling the silence, demanding to be seen.

I am at a loss as how to sign off to a love who plants the white seeds of fear in me. You see this, you know the way my fingers move.

My love.

My sleep.

Until tonight.

Yours, despairingly, shoulder girdle, right.

About the artist

Lucien Ross is a writer from Norwich. His poetry and prose regularly bleed together as his work moves between auto-fiction, lyrical essays, flash fiction and poetic prose informed by mythology and folklore as well as contemporary and critical theory. He is interested in disrupting formal categories of style and elevating unheard voices.

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