What the River did next.
It joined a fitness club.
It exercised in the park
with the mothers,
learnt about feeding routines,
sleep problems, how to get your child
into a good school. Next
it seeped into a church
and was surprised
to find it knew
most of the hymns but could not
fathom worship so it gave up
and joined the army
where strength
was a good thing,
not just strength
but also confidence. It had both,
but realised that a lot of the time
it felt cold, which was
one of those things it was
trying to get away from.
It ended up in the museum
which seemed to be a place
of lasting significance.
It worried that it might
wreck everything but knew
it was holding
valuable information: not just
the dates and times of floods,
numbers of drownings,
locations of lost cities,
but the whispered promises
of lovers on its bridges,
on its banks, the physics
of the mesmerisation of water,
the Collected Works of Fish.
The river deposited
all these secrets
in glass cases and labelled them.
After this it could have stopped
to think, but it was impossible
to interrupt its own flow:
it ran down the street
picking things up as it went.
​
​This poem was commended in the 2022 Ambit Poetry Competition
Freshers
The debate about what Bev should do if John really had
slept with that slag from the White Lion in Stoke
went on all night.
Not one of us would be the first to leave. Tasting freedom,
learning how to do roll ups, smoking one after another,
after another.
First we favoured the silent treatment. Basically, as she had
the moral high ground, he should plead with her.
Jill said, Nothing has been
the same since my father died. Gail knew about long distance
love and listened a lot to ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’
by John Denver.
Vicky had a downer on men. Pat knew that John had been
a good fuck and thought it, a shame to lose
that resource.
There was a kettle, tea bags, milk, we wouldn’t have thought
we needed food. That night we were high on heartache.
The one wonky chair,
mattress on the floor, threadbare carpet on lino, mould,
the smell of damp and tiny white mites crawling
on the wardrobe door
were a necessary part of it. Bev, the only blond, wore a white blouse,
the rest of us mostly in black. Was she
totem or sacrifice?
Jill said, not many people know what it is like when your father dies
and, especially, they don’t know
what it is like for me.
The slag from Stoke was a slag so she was beneath our attention.
We thought Jill needed a good fuck but really
that’s what we all wanted.
​
​
This poem was first published in The Moth poetry magazine