Guest Poem by Caroline Price

Caroline Price read music at York University and has worked as a violinist and teacher in Glasgow, London and Kent; she has more recently settled in East Anglia, where her family lives. She has published four collections of poetry, the latest of which is Picnic on the rocks, with frog [Shoestring Press 2017]. She has also published short fiction, and her first novel was long-listed for the Bridport Prize 2023. This poem is from Acumen 111.

The Seducer’s Hat

Like a skydiver about to plunge for the first time
from the opened plane into breathlessness

I stand pressed to the last strip of black
before sunlight, gazing across eight feet of blazing tarmac –

it takes such courage, this tackling head-on
of the heat. One   two   three   chimes a distant bell

and the track opposite scratches its way up the hillside,
shimmering. Fallen figs, hard as stones,

bruise my toes; spider threads, trailing
in the airless air, are enough to deter me.

You brush them away. Wear my hat! you cry
from the other side, tossing it towards me.