The Walking Woman
It’s fog-haze and halogen orange out.
Casting her skin more greys than fifty.
Illusion: the real illusion is it’s not one.
Daylight slubs her palette the same.
She’s not ashamed. She’s stoic with
her shopping trolley. She’s peaceful
in piss-reek bus shelters and practical
with scavenger-wiles and skip-tippings.
She stomps the sluggish suburban dawn.
Pebble-dash semis, slumped bungalows,
UPVC and hungover postmen. Families
bickering. Someone being sick in an alley.
She sneers in windows framing tiny tears
and toast. Mummies scraping desperate
knives at burnt bread. (Pathetic, she huffs:
who are these women?) She plods ever on.
Prodding at clods of dog shit with toes
of her cloggish brown shoes. She hawks
phlegm-splat frogspawn, gobbet-y dew
in the privet hedge outside your house.
Holly Magill lives in Worcestershire. She has had poems published in Message In A Bottle, FTW: Poets Against ATOS, The SHOp and Crannog.