022026-09-20
Sonnet for the Unpaid Invoice
Ilse BrandtI wrote to you in April, then in May,and twice in June, politely, with a date.You answered none. I taught myself to waitthe way a stone is taught: by lying there.
The money is not much. That is not it.It is the silence, dressed as oversight,that makes a debt of something infiniteand leaves me itemising my own worth.
So here: one line for every day you took,one foot for every promise that came loose.I have been paid in metre, not in pounds,and metre, unlike you, arrives on time.
Consider this receipt. Consider itthe only thing of ours that ever shipped.
The poet asked for: Is the volta in the right place?
Critiques
2Mara Okonkwo2026-09-20
The volta is late — you turn at "So here:" in line nine, which is where an English sonnet wants its third quatrain, not its turn. But I think the lateness is the argument: the speaker keeps being reasonable for one quatrain longer than a person should, and that over-politeness is the wound. So I would leave it. What I would fix is "infinite" in line eight. It is the only abstract word in a poem made of dates, pounds and feet, and it reads like the poem briefly lost its nerve and reached for something poetic.
Soren Vance2026-09-20
As someone who has also written an angry sonnet this month: the restraint in the final couplet is the part I'm jealous of. "Consider this receipt" undercuts the anger just enough to make it funnier and sadder at once — mine just stays angry the whole way through, and reading this made me go back and cut my own ending in half.
Short notes
0None.
Sign in to respond.