Poetry by Val Harris
My Hungry Lover
That summer I was an adulteress and it exhausted me. I whispered lies to my family and saw them flinch. In a room dark with vacancy I met my lover. Day and night, we lay entwined and bit by bit she ate me into a perfect shape, peeling the flesh from my bones; sculpting hollows, she trimmed me like a butcher. My lover was ravenous, and I embraced her - ‘eat me, eat me’, I whispered, and she devoured me with her rituals as I sunk into her efforts. My heart burned as together we purged old habits, until one day, my family saw how brittle I was and easily broken. They stormed my lies with ultimatums, but I could not let my lover go. She’s not real they screamed. I nearly believed it until I spotted her image on the back of a spoon and knew then how nothing would never be enough.
Val Harris is a poet/author from Surrey. She has been writing poetry for ever, but over the past few years her adult writing was set aside in favour of writing poetry for children (which she still does).
Her adult poetry has been published in various magazines. In the early part of this century, she ran a local Poetry Society Stanza group.
She won, and had poems commended, in the now defunct Writers Forum Magazine, as well as an article on the merits of Book Signing events. Val once lived and worked in the Middle East, and ran creative writing classes.