Shave
The backs of men’s necks
queue on the Tube.
Hot breath and the mustn’t
of reaching to touch. Such
a little inch of shared air
to transgress. Sticky dress
and long haul home to owned skin.
When I was eighteen,
my lover asked me to stand over him
with little buzzing clippers, to stroke
the hair off with their insect mouth.
I kissed all up that new tickle
of conquered skull, triumphant.
He walked beside me shorn, marked mine.
My thumb the first to smooth across, enjoy
the bite of new-cut hair.
Another summer, older,
and it’s my father asking.
Widower, too ill to go out.
Such uncomfortable trespass,
shudder and prickle,
to walk the clippers the way his second wife did,
cut paths over his small grey head.
I swept up after. I holstered the clippers
in the leatherette case and put them away
in the too-tidy bathroom of his last house.
There will always be another summer.
This one, both of us in this dappled, dazzling bath,
I rest one heel
then the other
on your shoulder, lean back
and trust your razor
down my leg, nuzzling
the unseen back of my knee.
Ramona Herdman’s collection Come what you wished for was published by Eggbox in 2003. She won a place on the Poetry Trust Advanced Seminar 2011. She was longlisted for the Pighog Poetry School Pamphlet competition 2014. Twitter @ramonaherdman
Shave was first published in The North