Sophie Sparham is a poet and
writer from Derby. They have written commissions for BBC Radio 4, The V&A,
The National Forest and The People's History Museum. They co-host the night
Word Wise which won best spoken word night at the 2019 Saboteur Awards. Their
latest collection 'The Man Who Ate 50,000 Weetabix' came out in April 2021 via
Verve Poetry Press. Sophie's work has been published in Orbis, Under the Radar
and The Morning Star. Their poem Sunrise Over Aldi won third place in the 2020
Charles Causley International Poetry Competition. They co-direct Derby Poetry
Festival.
Everything
aches
As if I were
a motorbike
lying
sideways like a bunion on crutches
of curb, a
record collection
boxed up in
rain. As if I were a memorial bench
In a pit of
clay, a punctured hill, a peeled dawn.
As if I were
a television
mounted to my
father’s wall, his eyes
glazing over
the elevator music of my mouth
as if I were
a sunset drowning
a jar of
wind, a jawful of stones.
As if I were
a river of broken teeth flooding
bedrooms like
a finish line.
As if I were
a sea, where every wave was a person
and they just
kept breaking
American
Diner in C Major
As soon as we
touch down in Seattle
I demand you
take me to the nearest diner
where I order
pancakes and ask the waitress
to refill my
coffee cup five times.
This is just
like the movies, where they talk
and smoke and
scrape the knife against the plate.
Camera one pans to me telling you my hatred
of tight jam
jar lids and how you can never
find Coca
Cola in a glass bottle anymore.
Camera two
zooms in on your raised eyebrows.
You grunt and
respond with an anecdote
about a
neighbour’s dog who has alopecia.
We’re still
nobodies, but here we’re international
nobodies. And
I think that means something.
Mickey and
Mallory, Rizzo and Kenickie, Mr Pink
and White
have all sat in these cheap plastic seats.
I picture
them, staring at the TV, watching scenes
of us from
back home. Fade in to me queuing
at the post
office, flicking a switch in the fuse box,
hanging out
the washing on the line. Don’t lie to me,
you think about the soundtrack to your biopic.
Sometimes,
I live in my
own made-up film montage longer
than in a
conversation. Bruce Springsteen would play
the role of
me, and I’d watch as he held his hips
in the
mirror. Cut to Bruce at the chippy, Bruce stirring
pasta over
the hob, Bruce standing in the reduced aisle
of the
supermarket, Bruce photographing pheasants
in the Peak
District, a smile on his face.
No, I
wouldn’t pay to see it again either.
Sax at
Watford Gap
There’s
always been something intimate about service stations.
Strangers pissing side by side,
piling together
waste as though building a monument
to the straight concrete roads which
enable life
to slip past the landscape. In an era, where
speed is the destination,
X doesn’t normally mark the spot by a
building that fills and empties like the tide,
yet here we
are.
Stood between rows of bumpers
close enough to kiss. He crosses the
white line and lowers the case to the concrete
before
retreating to the safety of his wingmirror. And I, all fingers and thumbs,
lift it to my
chest, as if new born, and crack open the shell. Inside, a small bronze
body,
reflects the
streetlights, swan necked, keys waiting to be touched. He knows that
I have longed
for you,
scaled the corners of my darkness,
where slowness is a scripture
held between my teeth. The three of
us walk the embankment, stare at the McDonald’s sign,
a landmark amongst the gulls.
Two strangers and you, a bucket chain
of sound,
passed from generation to generation,
between the empty coke cans and the old newspaper headlines.
Headlights stream off your body as he drives
into night.
I shall never meet him again, but
together
we held a gap between us, as fresh
and sensitive as the wound a milk tooth leaves when it
detaches
itself from the gum.
It gives me comfort to think hundreds
have sat here,
some as
unsure as me, feet dangling from the edge of this hour hand, thinking back to a
time
where they
didn’t have to sprint to the next season.
They say jazz
is about the silence
between the
notes.
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