Bus Pass
Your face was on a bus pass,
your hair falling around your face like a curly straw,
pressed in a puddle between the Queen’s old face
and an Aldi receipt for slippers and chicken.
I sit at the stop we used to wait at for the bus to pick us up,
but now you’re three stops ahead
and the journey’s been used up.
Maybe it was an accident,
you let our legs feel electric
and gave me your left headphone
to play a song you always skipped the second verse of,
too excited to hear the bridge.
And on our way home we stopped at the Pilchards Inn.
You got a Peroni and drank it in fifteen minutes
while you told me about Amelia Earhart,
explaining that liking true crime doesn’t make you a criminal.
I hold you in my hands
the way you held onto the rails of the bus,
trying not to fall,
even when I had my arms around your waist.
April arrives after March.
I stare at the date,
knowing it comes every year,
still letting it pass me by like a broken-down bus.
And the hazard lights come on,
but I hide,
sinking into the couch
with a show I still don’t know the intro for.
A song I only know the bridge to.
Emma Farmer is a 16-year-old poet from the Wirral exploring love, memory and change through everyday objects, faith and relationships. Her work examines what we carry with us and the traces people leave behind. She has submitted to the Foyle Young Poets Award and Fourteen Poems.