Three poems

By Nicola Healey

Missing Person

‘It wasn’t the kind of loss the world paid attention to.’

– Tove Ditlevsen, The Trouble with Happiness, tr. by Michael Favala Goldman

Because I could not find a place, 

I stopped fighting

and let the world swallow me whole.

Some breakdowns are sudden; some 

are slow digestions 

until you feel more mineral than self.

I was still alive, yes, but not alive,

not in a life; a casualty of anomie.

People don’t object when there is

no outward sign of life-loss. 

The dissolution can go on for years 

as though you are a missing person 

that no one has missed. 

You almost forget you ever had substance:

you meet yourself in an acid reflux

of memory, and are appalled.

But there is a freedom in being 

so inconsequential. Unobserved, you notice things, 

bristling at a frontier of existence:

a rush or trickle of music heard in the blood. 

A creature’s mere continuance. A flower’s 

indomitable duty. A clear thought in a clear sentence 

as though held by a test tube.

So much is shown up

as a shallow sham of prosperity.

But haze only hovers, then vanishes.

And an elastic jaw lurks in the dark.

I am discontinuous – easy prey,

but truer than the cold-blooded world.

Prayer for the Sleepless

Nightmares flood my sleep

with scenes of war, with breaches

of tech-terror. The relief –

when the mind hauls itself free,

into the room’s brace.

A child dreams to absorb the day.

An adult dreams to absorb the present 

and the past and the future, 

whose shadow is only growing longer. 

I try and shut it all out. The mind is a city

that no one will protect but you.

I lug around a sleep-strained sprawl 

like an Atlantis; it holds

no fresh air, no daylight.

To sleep gently, wake lightly, is my wish.

To be restored and unassailed.

I cast this – into the night’s well.

Institutional Spell

Clinical smells: a whiff of 

disinfectant, ethanol hands,

professional niceness

breezing through

astringent rooms, bound 

with a central-heating fug

and an antiseptic air, at the 

dentist, the doctor’s, stir 

something like forgotten 

Stockholm syndrome. Terror-

laced protection, routine 

and subordination.

I breathe a yellow primrose 

to free my brain.

Nicola Healey’s poems and essays have appeared in Free Bloody Birds, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review and The Hopkins Review, among other places. Her first pamphlet, A Newer Wilderness, was published by Dare-Gale Press in 2024 and won the Michael Marks Poetry Award. She lives in Buckinghamshire.