Heels
for Libby

I don’t wear them
or have any

but you gave me a pair
of seven-inch goth platform heels.

They made me six-foot-eight.
I was twenty, or maybe

nineteen,
sixteen years ago

dancing in the bar
at the end of the Curry Mile.

Don’t put your weight in the heel
Put it into the ball

of your foot.
That night I danced with Grace

and you to Rage Against the Machine
and slid across the floor,

drunk with possibility.
How I wish I had learned

those skills
for life.

Max Wallis is the author of Polari Prize-shortlisted Modern Love (2011) and Everything Everything (2016). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rialto, Poetry Scotland, Fourteen Poems and Popshot Magazine. He was once Grindr’s poet-in-residence. Instagram: @maxwallis

Settling

You brought doughnuts home yesterday. This morning,
I eat one in bed, tart, blackcurrant. Fingers sticky
with the itch that haunts us, I fill the bath. On the TV last night
Amy declared that she doesn’t want to be subsumed.
Pushing the bubbles to one side,

I think that sounds like a holiday. To momentarily sink
beneath the surface of someone else’s desire. We came here with
no illusions. Just edges, fought for, spoken in soliloquy.
You said we were two people travelling in opposite directions
who happened to meet at the same place. I said,

We were two sides of a mirror that had always been there,
reversing shadow caught in the edges of awareness. Whichever way,
it happened. Now we own a sofa and bookshelves and
a plant named Jack.

Julie Anne Jenson is an American-born writer and researcher who has made her home in the UK for twenty years. Her poetry has featured in Dust Poetry Magazine, and she is a listener poet with Good Listening Project. Twitter and Instagram @JulieAJenson

Just one scampi is called scampo

In the accommodation guest book
all the comments were all signed by two.
I decline to contribute:
not too sheepish, didn’t feel right.

I wonder what I am doing
here as I head to the bus stop.
Cars and camper vans with entitled duos
take up space in the road. I hog the verge
using as little as possible.
They pass by with expressionless faces.

There was one pub at the pier.
I sit for hours, watching
couples, families, groups, dogs.

I smile at them for as long as I can,
but more often than not am met with confused looks.
Trying to join in conversation only exposes
the fact I am half drunk and very stoned.
My attempts at acting normal are thin;
the veneer is transparent.

I resort to typing this into my phone as I sit
surrounded by a crowd of others. I watch them
eat, mostly seafood, and they look like monsters.

Brian Kelly has been writing poetry for a number of years. Originally from Clydebank, now living in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, Brian has a PhD from the University of Manchester and works in public health research.