Seventeen

Late, I perch on your bed, the edge

of what my memory calls a cot,

as we speak of how the summer’s light

can heal an acned face,

the reader set for French

and how the government

has got it wrong. The thousand things

I want to say, feel I have not said,

I keep inside. A radiator gurgles.

Ali growls at Liston

from a poster tacked with pins;

Picasso’s quick-drawn birds take flight.

Suddenly I’m there, back

when you were two and bored;

settled down I let you fix

a hundred colored feathers in my hair.

(First published in Pankhearst Fresh/Fresh Featured, 10 March 2016)