In praise of commercial radio and local taxis
After you’ve flung yourself inside
with your rain-soaked jacket, broken brolly
half-mulched paper carrier bags, your crap clattered
all over the backseat and down into the footwells
where you know you’ll have to crawl to retrieve it –
door thunked shut, you’re swallowed whole
into this cocoon: pine-scent, antibac and the dry
whoosh of his heater – lean your careworn bones into
synthetic leather snug, let your head flop to the window
race raindrops outside through your breath’s germy mist
and even though it’s Fields Of Gold and Sting always
gives you the ick, then fecking Ed Sheeran whingeing on
then ads for boiler insurance, life insurance, carpets, windows
aesthetics clinics, waste disposal, Dyno-Rod, dating apps
Big Macs and how the government are here to help!
as he pulls out of the heavy traffic, streetlight strobes
faster across your eyes like you’re in a 1980s Cher video
Robbie’s on about Angels, like every nana’s funeral
T’Pau warn of upsets with crockery, Madonna’s still
Crazy For You, Whitney wants to dance with somebody –
I mean, don’t we all, bab? –
you’ll be home soon.
Holly Magill’s poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. In 2019 she won first prize in the Cannon Poets ‘Sonnet or Not’ competition. She co-edits the online poetry magazine, Atrium – www.atriumpoetry.com. Her debut pamphlet, The Becoming of Lady Flambé, was published by Indigo Dreams in 2019. Her second pamphlet 20 was published by Drunk Muse Press in Spring 2023.