We play Candy Crush
We run upstairs and trace our fingers over Ariana Grande’s face. We hold fruit sweets
to the light like crown jewels, we gum-up our fingers with orange segments from
the market, zesty with possibility. We play Candy Crush. In this place, each house has
the face of its owner: here is a wide red door grinning with jokes, ginger-headed pantiles,
a gutter bent like a crooked smile, standpipes, wonky like broken backs. We spy through
spider web windows, pretend to run upstairs, bounce on their beds and play Candy Crush.
We turn to see the city booming grey smoke like a video game. We look up to blue sky,
and at cathedrals with gold glow-domes. We barter with God. Count the stairs;
one, two, three, exposed like broken ribs. We play in upturned streets, in thrilling
zig-zagged concrete basements, skin our shins, bounce over rubble, over the smothered
voice of a small, blue shoe stubbornly tapping out the songs Babusya taught, its strap
still upright as a shoot. We say to ourselves, it will not be too late as we look for more stairs
to count, more streets where houses are still alive and the tarmac is black and cool. No bones
are bleaching white as we run up and down and up. From the top, we trace our fingers
over shadows playing Candy Crush in someone else’s bedroom, in someone else’s Country where they all still have stairs.
Jenny McRobert won The Kathryn Bevis Prize, 2024 and was shortlisted for Bridport and The Rialto. She won the International Welsh Poetry Competition in 2023. Her debut collection, Silver Samovar, was published by The High Window Press in 2021
Christmas has shut up shop
So that was Christmas. The tree
must be dismantled. Each gaudy bauble
shrouded in tissue, packed for its
eleven month holiday in the loft,
all the glitter dulled under wraps.
The tree makes its way into the garden
looms at the window, a disconsolate ghost
to end up chipped back into the soil.
Wind down these music boxes.
Switch off the miniature village lights.
Cards must fly down from the mantel,
disgruntled birds. Some of these senders
will have lived their last Christmas.
The fire takes them, sucks them into
its amber depths. Next, the snowdrops.
Angela Topping is the author of nine full collections of poetry and four pamphlets. The most recent is Earwig Country, (Valley Press 2024) She is a former Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library. Her poems have been included in Magma, Poetry Review and The Dark Horse.
UnChristmassed
An early frost thaws on the ski slope roof
of the Alpine Lodge in the seaside town.
Wooden huts offer hats, gloves and earmuffs,
wheels of cheese waxed in Christmas bauble shades
boxed with artisan chutney and crackers.
A bearded man tempts with shallow paper cups
of sustainable vodka, waits for the card
machine to warm up.
A tunnel of lights leads down to the sea.
Skaters circle to Aretha Franklin
demanding: ‘R E S P E C T’.
A trail of trees, built by elves, are labelled ‘Do Not Touch’.
One a pyramid of giant metal spheres;
another an upturned ice-cream cone, Astro-turf green.
Real firs are lashed to the railings of the West Pier,
twinkling lights redundant in the blinding
November glare that turns specs dark in selfies.
Jet skiers rev and turn in moves once made
by mods and rockers in towns like this,
as thrill seekers zip from pier to shore on wires.
The Snowman flight simulator
plays ‘Walking in the Air’ on repeat,
competing with carols with a reggae beat,
and an easy listening rendition
of that Slade song, unChristmassed
without the assistance of Noddy Holder’s lungs.
Maria C. McCarthy writes poems, stories and memoir. She lives in the Medway Towns www.medwaymaria.co.uk