Sam Payne

A new kind of language

There is a space inside my daughter 
where new words grow. 
She wants to visit the Perriment
insisting it’s a place we’ve been before.
We scroll through photos on my phone,
the farm with the fat, pink piglets 
the play park with the soft sand and the monkey bars 
each time she shakes her head.

Sometimes she’s a foreign land, wild and unmapped
and I’m ready to give up but then 
there is a photo of us 
standing on a wooden tower 
overlooking a labyrinth
there, she says, there, the Perriment! 

I should tell her it’s a maze
but I like her word better and we’ll keep it
this word that didn’t exist before her, a word
for a place only the two of us inhabit.


Sam Payne is a writer living in Devon. She holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing. Sam writes flash fiction and poetry and her work has appeared in a number of places online and in print. She tweets at @skpaynewriting