By Becca Miles
She laughed as I stretched, brambles digging in my palm,
calling myself ‘the Autumn Tantalus’. She told me not to hurt myself
trying to impress her. She kissed the criss-cross scratches on my wrist.
I learned a lot about myself. I’m very shallow. I loved being a head taller than her.
I looked up hexadecimal colour codes to find the shade of her mittens.
#A94064 – ‘comparable to a very dark blush’.
#CE4676 – ‘not bright, but a lot of presence’.
#A95C68 – ‘gentle and dignified’.
Every dog made her forget what we were talking about. I remembered
the ones my birth mother bought, when she was happy. I almost didn’t tell her.
She found a bluish lump lurking in her raspberry cake. I said
it was just a lost blueberry, but the thought of mould
burrowed into her head. I covered the plate with a napkin.
When she called me a gentlewoman, I wanted to write about nothing
except how right that felt.
We sat with my back to her chest, glasses hung around my neck,
the neon fairground lights bleeding into the night. She read me a poem about Monet.
On the bus, the fluorescent lights and lurching
curdled like milk and lemon. She let me hide my face in her coat.
I crouched in a shadow outside Sainsbury’s while she
bought Polo mints and paracetamol. ’Parrots ate ‘em all’. I could still
make her laugh. I puked them up at the station.
On the train, head down, face pressed into the crook of my arm, I still
felt the soft pads of her fingers, stroking circles on the back of my neck.
Becca used to write poetry to procrastinate from a Biology degree and accidentally procrastinated their way into a writing career. They’ve had individual poems published in several anthologies and magazines, most recently Poetry For All, The Wild Word, and New Feathers Anthology. In 2020 they contributed twelve poems to the joint collection Steel-Tipped Snowflakes, published by Stairwell Books. They can be found on Twitter and Bluesky @RuBecSo, or in the UK with their wonderful partner and an elderly lizard called Gizmo. https://beccacpmiles.wixsite.com/beccamiles/