poems
that summer
that summer you tell me you want to grow old
with Delphine. i don’t stop the car or leave you
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on the hard shoulder to pick shattered glass
from melting pitch or your slinged,still-fractured arm.
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ijust drive & drive, point our easy wheels in & out
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of measured gaps, avoid the rough white lines that vibrate,
shudder, accuse. that summer, Nice is so fucking hot
we only get it in strips; through locked persiennes,razor-angled,
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slit. mosquito-sleep injects its slow narcotic weight. at night
the bourganvillias fist. at night I envy you her mouth
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Winning poem in the 2017 Myslexia unpublished poets prize
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Ann’s shed
bags of cement, rusty poles, a rook of hoes, spades and shears. ivy
growing through a crack in the door, Grow-Bags, rolled up carpet strips,
a Helping-Hand pick-up stick, plastic sheets and bamboo canes;
used each season that comes around, stuck in a punctured yellow bucket.
a worn-out cushion, tangled wire, a Spear & Jackson tool (I can’t describe)
3 coloured and leaky watering cans. the first summer flies; all novice,
all weak, tough shadows grown long in the day, and here - a coat
I should recognize. sweet peas straggling the roof, defying a rickety trellis,
the neighbour's cooking drifting in, another roast, another day fro rest, a jar
of shells from an unremembered beach, a barking dog, a cobweb rocking
between window and frame; its threads spanning more pots than her garden would need,
and the gardener herself; bedded down in her purple room with palliative bed,
a catheter, a morphine supply, a disease. the window always ajar (to breathe,
to breathe, to take in the last of all she would leave) listening only to birds
to voices now, and the wind playing each individual leaf. and Ann,
still asking how everyone is, whilst softly growing her own death.
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