Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I had a face off once about a take-away coffee
with that dark haired woman. I asked for hot milk
in an Americano and she said I wanted a Cappuccino,
which I didn’t, I wanted a white Americano, and she said
that one always came black and she knew all about coffees,
was I accusing her of not knowing all about coffees?
Of course, she had her audience: that soft faced supervisor
and tin badge-breasted young Natalie, hard as they come
with her made-up stare slashing up the precinct traffic.
Watching her serve while waiting to be served
I used to wonder whether it was the job or the people or both
that fixed everything in that face glaze of middle distance,
the one that said there never had been, and never would be,
any new wave customer care flies on her (forget that crap).
Was retail a choice she’d made at sixteen or seventeen or a vocation
for which she’d stood in a queue of dead women’s shoes
until she was called to the counter of the Six Buns Bakery,
the queue the learning, the shoes the skills, the counter the therapy
for a life I can only stereotype in this cap-brute, cake hungry town?
It doesn’t matter now anyway, that question, because it’s all gone
as I come to push the glass door for the free cup on my loyalty card
and find the door doesn’t push and a sign on the glass saying
‘In Administration.’ There are letters skimmed across the mat,
cloths, rubber gloves, polystyrene cups and their lids, stock books,
slices of cheese sweating through their wrappers, a stainless steel ladle
all randomly fallen to places as if after some zero gravity experiment.
A huge bright poster of a potato stuffed with baked beans and butter
shields some of this floor show played out behind walls of glass,
and a small felt-tipped card announces that the cake of the week
is once again the Viennese biscuit with fake cream filling, and jam.