Anna Stockdale
An IKEA Life
I want to move in to a 550 sq ft studio apartment
where I will erect my angular MÖRBYLÅNGA table
just inches and hours from where I will sleep with someone
on my cornered BRÅTHULT sofa bed, or fuck on my forked LÅNGFJÄLL swivel chair,
or make love to on my poorly assembled FÖRVARA kitchen cabinet.
There is something romantic about flat pack furniture.
The private notion that someone else is doing something less fun
with these adult Lego pieces (reading; cooking; sitting) is titillation:
flicking through pages of stiff Scandinavian hardwood
and seventeen shades of easily-stained white fabric,
I circle the objects in the catalogue
I will build and take apart like flimsy empires.
Anna Stockdale (she/her) is Irish, capricious and curly. She recently completed a BA in English with Creative Writing and is beginning an MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. She was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introduction Series 2018, and has read her poems at the International Literature Festival in Dublin. Her poetry has won the “Two Chairs” creative writing competition, and has been highly commended twice in the “Write Here, Write Now” creative writing competition. Her poems appear in Banshee and in a forthcoming Poetry Ireland eBook. Feel free to follow her quiet Twitter profile @AnnaStocky and have a precious day.