Young Poets

Ghost of her

She still haunts those streets

her best friends and her walked

every day for seven years

on their way to school,

dressed in green with kingdom keys

sewn onto their golden crest.

Past yellowing council flats,

eight o’clock dog walkers,

occasional drifts of cannabis,

the scent of left-over banana

in their lunch boxes.

x

She still haunts those streets

on light summer nights.

The pavement is her runway,

white Converse are stilettos

clicking under streetlamps.

Hoping her favourite English teacher

might notice her out of knee-socks,

in boy-friend jeans and red sunglasses.

She counts the beeps on her fingers.

x

Each headlight flash a camera

to pout or twirl her hair for.

Body sways possessed by music,

sipping vodka lemonade

from a daisy water bottle.

x

She still haunts that one street.

Her Leavers Day T-shirt

signed with fading sharpie names

lost in the mess under her bed.

Now she walks like she’s see-through.

The peach of her skin,

the gold in her hair

washed by rain

from the brooding sky.

x

Zipping up her hoodie tight

she cowers as the car horns screech

like gunshots in the dark.

The Suburban Dream

I plant plastic hydrangeas

in artificial grass.

Blue paint seeps onto my fingers,

I rub them on my pinny

to keep my sundress clean.

x

These white picket fences

stand like metal bars,

protecting me from outside.

It’s safe here, he says.

And I always listen.

x

Cherry pie burns golden.

The timer is a siren,

it blares through the window.

Yesterday I lost my oven gloves,

bare hands will do today.

x

Metal scorches my skin

while I plate the perfect pie,

fingertips melting like wax.

Nothing a coat of pink

nail varnish won’t fix.

x

He’ll be here soon.

I twirl to the bedroom,

spray my hair in the mirror.

Dab some rose blush

with my fists until my cheeks

x

are sore and swollen

and beautiful.

I put on his favourite record

x

and I dance

and I dance

to the suburban dream.

x

Just business

I lug through the rain

and think of the heat in Bordeaux.

Load up your Instagram,

rain drips down my screen

blurring your face into pixels.

x

I smile at those dark eyes

I’ll see in three days. My twenty-first.

That blonde girl beside you

makes me stop, catch my breath.

Orange gin glass in her hand. Playing God.

x

The number nine chugs up my street

I tuck my phone to my chest,

scavenge for my change, take a seat.

I picture her alluring blue eyes,

She’s older. Still beautiful.

x

It’s my birthday in three days

and I’m off to work. Of course,

you’re in France working as well

but without the plastic hangers

and whining customers.

x

Just a camera on your wrist.

A girl by your side.

Ha Long

Something as mountainous as a mountain ought not to have a shadow

shivering on the waters. It is too obvious

a lie. When their father falls, the shadows will not survive. Like many of us,

they are already teetering on the border

of what is real and what we wish

was there. The motor of the boat

makes me nauseous not because it moves but because it feels too close

to the blades of a helicopter hovering above

a city with its searchlights open wide like the wings of a butterfly wanting

nothing more than to have its say in things it does not understand.

The guide tells me that this sea is not a sea, but

that is a technicality. Anything this large is a sea,

including a helicopter, a mountain, a blade, or

a mouth tracing the scars that the water has left

on the serrated bottoms of the rocks. There used to be more to them,

but just like everything around them they grew old

and the sea began to look less like a sea and more

like a technicality. Even so, all day they look

at their shadows, denying their fear but not their mass.

The Great Greenland Shark: Timeless.

When I was thirteen years old the Ancient Greeks took me

to the cave that had stopped being a cave

when they told it to be a miracle and it, like an unburdened puppy,

sat up and listened

before speaking. Now it was my turn

to fit the impossible in my mouldy coat pocket.

I stepped into the toothy maw of the beastly boulder and saw:

a greenland shark, swimming in my breath.

It stank. I had brought coins and incense, but I suspected

my ancestors of pouring out their gratitude from below.

Eager to be different, I spoke. I was young,

and if I hadn’t been impressionable I wouldn’t have been there,

wouldn’t have been here, wouldn’t have done anything at all, let alone

been capable of understanding that great greenland shark.

Away, it swam, and it took my breath with it.

For the first few months after my visit, I thanked it

every morning when I woke, out loud.

Then, winter came, and I saw the shapes my breath formed

on the window of the world.

I stopped showering, and stank.

I stopped talking, and grew moss.

I stopped thinking, and swam,

out, into the earth.