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Double Take<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n It was my birthday.<\/p>\n In time-honoured wont<\/p>\n I took the bus to the Rubicon<\/p>\n for tea and cake with Uncle Pete,<\/p>\n Master of Treats and Ceremonies.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Tea Room chinked and tinkled, snug<\/p>\n with radio hum and finger crooked<\/p>\n genteel folk – all right and proper.<\/p>\n In the lulling hum-drummed buzz<\/p>\n and the fullness of tea and time<\/p>\n the crazed mirror tranced and fogged<\/p>\n and a boy swam in its fathom.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The double take threw back a year<\/p>\n and Ziggy\u2019s circus loomed.<\/p>\n In my cornered eye, a ring drilled bear<\/p>\n danced a hot iron dance<\/p>\n to the dark-heart beat of the rousted crowd,<\/p>\n in a lumbering circle of madness.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For the blink of a wakening eye<\/p>\n I bore his infinite ring of misery.<\/p>\n To the startled crack of the radio whip<\/p>\n the jolted Tea Room chinked again;<\/p>\n I stared dumbfound into the fathom<\/p>\n and met my father\u2019s eyes –<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The image held.<\/p>\n The double take gave back the Rubicon<\/p>\n and Uncle Pete, but the boy was lost forever<\/p>\n in the mirrors craze.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Stella Wulf<\/strong> lives in South West France and is currently studying towards an MA in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. Her work has been published by The Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Prolebooks, Message in a Bottle, Obsessed with Pipework<\/em> and other online literary journals. Her work has also appeared in Lancaster University\u2019s Flash Journal where her poem was recently selected as the editor\u2019s choice. She is mad about words and their collective impact and aspires to order them into poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Double Take It was my birthday. In time-honoured wont I took the bus to the Rubicon for tea and cake with Uncle Pete, Master of Treats and Ceremonies. The Tea Room chinked and tinkled, snug with radio hum and finger crooked genteel folk – all right and proper. In the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[139,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2015-poetry-picks","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9142"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9441,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9142\/revisions\/9441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}