How to get here

Among the joys of love was when we got
our first apartment on a boulevard

above the trams and tree-tops and the wires
that cut the street like tangram puzzles and

our friends would come with olives and cheap wine
they found the place by following the maps

I drew in coloured inks with metro stops
hand-lettered street names and my drawing of

the dappled fountain they must pass to find
us and I drew these maps for you so that

you’d find me too I having been brought up
on maps and globes and paths marked out for on

and off the beaten track the map of you
the glorious map of you that even now

I could bring back in inks from memory
indelible as tram-lines and the paths

that crossed the park the dogs on leads the girls
with prams the foreign grass marked out with signs.

Stephen Keeler’s award-winning poetry is widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies and online. His small collection ‘They Spoke No English’ is published by Nine Pens Press and his (prose) memoir, ’50 Words for Love in Swedish’, won the 2022/23 People’s Book Prize. He was long-listed in this year’s National Poetry Competition and has edited anthologies for, among others, Candlestick Press. Substack @stephenkeelerwriter