All words © Stephanie Powell | Attic Poet
December is a fastening month. Too late for stirring. Too hot to light the stove with the kitchen window closed. Ten years’ ago, same sort of summer- an old friend sits boyishly on the lip of a kerb waiting- undone by impatience, the heat. Coming apart like steam. Now, in the thick of rushing days, he sits thinly on the edge of park benches, windowsills, traffic signs- but trying to talk to him is like trying to talk with the sky. And if you had his number, you’d text to say you were back in the city. But you write this poem instead, imagine he reads it over your shoulder. It is Friday and the week is no longer waiting. It is loosened right down to the folds of its belly. In a hundred restaurant kitchens along this road, butter is sparking up to fire in pans. Range hoods are greased and roaring. Chefs are wrapped in smoke. The bins are full, and everything is on the precipice of ripeness or failure. And it is busy at the Empress, the line at the bar is two shoulders deep. The barman lifts his head above the crowd to find some air. You wait your turn in a queue, thickening and thinning like the tide. When it is your turn, you order softly in a voice, he struggles to hear. There was always a smallness carried in you, when it came to men. And tonight, outside drinking with friends, ice lounges in glasses, loose tobacco covers the table. On the way home the kebab van won’t take card. My husband walks almost too fast to keep up. Hunger fills his striding legs; I am a step behind but staying close. At 1am we are making oven chips, draining glasses of cold water. The city below clicks on in rhythm with the timer. The fingers of potato browning to crisp. And who’d have thought love so simple? And underneath this road somewhere are the fault lines, the closed underpasses the dust, ghost, and chicken bones keeping us from the earth.
