Patrick Yarker
Inside Job
We had keys and never saw a guard;
were quick soft-shoeing down dark cartons
of corridor, up silent exit stairs.
No lights, but the lift worked
and the trolley waited, so all it took
was time to trundle boxes from a room:
kettle, desk-lamp, two walls of books
hard-backed, ingot-heavy,
then the prints and pictures. We left useless clue:
bright panes of paint on a wall,
the blotter squared off.
Door shut, nothing looked out of place.
In front, we stacked the Escort till its springs
clenched
(back seat flat, rear view bricked up with books),
and locked the hatchback on my father.
He sat a passenger while mother probed
into the Strand, then left towards the Thames.
I waved his sixty five years out of sight
and couldn’t spot his window walking back
complicit as cancer in his picking clean.
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