adonis

Thursday morning in Walthamstow

Opens its eyes on a puzzle of

Back gardens

Limp washing lines and paths

Hidden by upswept petals.

The ash tray flower pot

Is mounting a resistance

The kettle is not yet set to boil

But it glows

In the semi-dark

Quietly.

Against a backdrop of bleak plants

netted sky

and a speckling of alarm blips

our George Orwell anti-hero

Begins to thumb the novel of his day

while

listening to the radio mumble disasters;

a cloud of gas spotted over the North Sea,

bombs, storms and soured milk.

Last night you drank the grappa from the reproduction bottle

after cycling home on a rented bike.

For a fleeting moment

between Clerkenwell and Old Street

you were free

feeling the wind in your heels like no

civil servant before you

your pea coat caught a gush of breeze

and you felt the wing tips of destiny.

This morning

the sky is balding and the clouds are limp

a glassy man, once a god full of booze,

lies tossed and empty by your shoes.

Edwina Attlee is a writer and researcher currently undertaking a PhD at the London Consortium. She is writing about dream spaces, laundry practices and the space of the home. She has written for GUTmag, Time Out and Kicking Against the Pricks and has had poetry published in Poetry & Audience and Trans Script. She is co-editor of STATIC.