Sitting Tenant

I wish they’d told me about the sitting tenant
when I bought this fixer-upper. A permanent

presence, a silent moth of a housemate,
an old creeper, a late-

night slipper shuffler, who leaves the toilet seat
up, the tap running and messages writ

on the steamed-up mirror
with an icicle finger

and lingers on the stairs
like cat hairs.

I wouldn’t mind so much if he’d stop hogging
the bedclothes, and levitating

me when my boyfriend wants a cuddle on the settee
or when I have friends and family round for tea.

Kim M. Russell, 30^th April 2026

Well that zoomed past! It’s the last day of NaPoWriMo and the final optional prompt, inspired by Russell Edson’s poem ‘Angels’. Edson “speaks of these spiritual warrior-messenger-guardians as if they were a type of endangered animal. Brief as it is, the poem is disorienting in its use of flattened diction, odd similes, and elliptical statements.”

Our challenge is to write poems that discusses a real or mythical being or profession (demons, firefighters, demonic firefighters) with the same sort of musing yet dispassionate tone. I couldn’t resist returning to a poem I wrote in 2019 and reworking it.