Covalent Bonding
In the end I couldn’t compete
with the intermolecular pull that drew you to her.
Me, the less reactive one – bookish, inert,
our bond replaced by her sizzling reactivity.
The day I overheard in the common room
that the reaction had occurred, that’s when I knew
I had been displaced, that your inner shell
now brimmed with stability.
I failed chemistry that year.
She was in lower Sixth
and from the back row of the re-sits
I watched the outline of her flimsy bra strap
undulate across her shoulder blades
as she leaned in close to the desk,
and I tried not to imagine how familiar
you now found her otherness.
Even your names possessed a hidden consonance,
as though your fates were held suspended somehow
in molecular design. A force stronger than us both
let you take those atoms from me
and give them to her,
leaving my one remaining electron
quaking in its outer shell.
Dr. Penny Shutt is a poet and psychiatrist who writes in secret in between patients on her NHS laptop and runs poetry therapy workshops in her spare time. Some of her poems can be found at www.pennyshutt.weebly.com and she tweets @drpennyshutt.