Your stories
from Finding my father (The 1901 census)
How you were banished to the cloakroom
for kicking teacher and, bored among the coats,
swung on the school bell, watched
in astonishment as classroom doors
burst open, children ran home for lunch.
How you were expelled, caught scarlet fever,
weeks later looked so sweet
teacher took you back into the fold.
How you turned yourself into a steam engine
and, wheels revolving, chugged along
unpaved streets every Sunday to extract
pennies of payment for the bedlinens
your widowed mother had sold.
How when you were one from bottom
of the class your mother addressed you
as 'Thirty-nine' till you rose to tenth,
how you exploded her dream of you as a rabbi
by believing in mathematics and science,
won scholarships at the age of fifteen.
These stories, safe from bedbugs, the chill
of the lavvy in the middle of the night,
entranced your little girls who pictured
poverty as a fairy tale not a mangy dog
that sniffs out the hungry, won't be driven off.
Your children's children were grown up
by the time you described coming out of school
on dark afternoons, buying a penny's worth
of broken biscuits, playing marbles in the road
and having to wait outside when the others went in
for tea until your mother trudged home with her box
of wares, how on frosty nights the cold bit
so deep into your legs you could feel it still.
Page(s) 8-9
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The