Alone at the New Road Hotel
He is right to suspect me
of infidelity,
there will be other rooms,
there have been rooms before.
At the old textile factory turned hip hotel,
in Whitechapel’s tatty bravado,
as the brutal heat is sucked from the day by rain
like a pinprick eases a balloon,
relief mists the corner window.
The streets outside knife-edged and taut,
the stench of rubbish and drunks,
with me marooned on the bed,
a small continent in itself,
puffed clouds of white sheets
muffled by pillows,
with a lover whose name is
solitude.
With a lover whose name is
muffled by pillows,
puffed clouds of white sheets,
a small continent in itself,
with me marooned on the bed,
the stench of rubbish and drunks,
the streets outside knife-edged and taut,
relief mists the corner window
like a pinprick eases a balloon,
as the brutal heat is sucked from the day by rain.
In Whitechapel’s tatty bravado,
at the old textile factory turned hip hotel,
there have been rooms before,
there will be other rooms
of infidelity.
He is right to suspect me.
Charlotte Ansell lives on an old Sheffield keel moored on the River Medway. Her third poetry collection Deluge(Flipped Eye) was a 2019 Poetry Book Society Winter recommendation. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Mslexia, Butcher’s Dog, Prole, Algebra of Owls and various anthologies. She was a recipient of a Royal Society of Literature Literature Matters Award in 2020 with fellow poet Janett Plummer, and she is a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen Collective.