Woken again in the fifth hour to darkness,and memories of a shattered voice who cannotleave his lover, and from the pretty recentpast the Romanian honey breakfast, a train toWindermere, the bookshop at the corner ofthe station; then where all light fades as a shadowcomes home to the maisonette, a place forthe homeless, a place halfway here, halfwaythere, halfway to nowhere, and the scent of acheap winter breeze hanging in the air, thesnow falls, and there is no post today, no schools,no yoga, no horse racing, and the toycompanies collapse; up with the blindsand hit by the blinding light, the earth turnedto white, the earth with all its worms, thenback to bed where the heat tenderly gathersbeneath the coverlet, and awoken again by shouts,go to the window where a fight breaks out,the taller one with the bobble hat and thesmaller one tussle it out in the snow, swingingeach other like blushing roses in a burningwind and the taller one grabs the other guy’srucksack and tosses it over the balustrade andinto the cold river, and it reminds me of a birdfight I saw last spring, where one big seagulltrapped a blackbird beneath its feet andpounded that bird until it faked its own death,and when the seagull came back the blackbirdtook its opportunity and tossed itself into thecold river; the smaller guy came back lookingfor something in the snow, he started kickingthe earth and then left.
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About the writer
Mark G Pennington. Mark G Pennington is a writer based in Kendal, UK and he is the author of Barren Stories for Moonlit Mannequins (Dempsey & Windle 2018) which is his debut collection of poetry. He has recently been nominated for The Pushcart Prize for poetry and his poems have appeared in many magazines and journals, including Scarlet Leaf Review, Visions with Voices, Poetry Pacific, Visitant and The Oddville Press.
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