Skip to main content

Sorting by Clint Wastling

When I walk by The White Horse and Griffin
on Whitby’s old Church Street 
I remember trinkets found
when mum downsized to a retirement flat.
She snatched the box from me. 
You can’t throw that!
This will give you some idea of our task:
place card holders, a receipt for grandparent’s honeymoon 
dated 1935, confetti, a tarnished lapel pin.


Throwing away the past can be cleansing,
can be painful, always a little loss
and if we are preservers of the past
then I am growing toward mother’s view:
let others decide,  let the future obliterate.
Letters read again, photos seen,
all the love there was evidenced
in all the love there’s been,
spent in a million kisses


a hundred thousand wishes
preserving all that’s gone before.
Names from this box of trinkets.
Now when I walk by The White Horse and Griffin
On Whitby’s old Church Street,
I remember that hotel bill and pause--
my grandparents walked through these doors
took their honeymoon here
where past and present meet. 

---

Clint Wastling’s  poetry has been published in Blue Nib, Dream Catcher, Strix, Marble and  online with The Algebra of Owls. Clint has a collection – Layers published by Maytree Press.  His poem The Lefty Revolution was a winner in the 2018 Northern Writes Award. His novel, The Geology of Desire, is an LGBTQ thriller set around Whitby in the 1980’s and Hull during World War II (Stairwell Books). 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Home by Jessa Forest

Home scratches at her shingles with tree branch fingers, pulls the air conditioning unit close to her grimy aluminum siding, and keens an empty song of mourning. We found her wandering the tornado snarled wild three months ago, starved and lonely. She doesn’t know how to take care of herself, you see? We fed her shards of dining room tables, kindling for the fireplace, and cast iron bathtubs clawed feet first. She was slow to recover so we gutted her plumbing, ripped out her nerves, and rewired the electricity. She let the water in every time it rained so we put a new roof on her and let her out for regular walks around the wolf pen. Let her mingle with the vultures, I said, let her feel useful and clean up the dead but no one wanted to listen. We found rot an mold in her corners, infused her insulation with antibiotics, and quarantined her for two weeks while she belched ladderback chairs, sofa cushions, wind chimes, and broken bookcases. She still has her bad days. After feeding time

“Are You So Tired Then, Stranger?” by Ace Boggess

  —Dick Allen, “B&B”    Wind exhausts with its icy fists. Knives of rain wear me down, & leaves in their helicopter swirls like leaflets dropped from a plane. October depletes me, & November. They’ve too much busyness. They send me spinning, dancing, lonely with the rake, the broom. I surrender, collapsing like an old barn, debris of me piling in a chair with clear view of the television.  News is on. It spends me. Talk of politics, also. I’d like  to shut up the voices that fatigue. They hum like a B-flat in the pipes. They bicker & scold, condemn. They expend me like carrying  groceries up a flight of stairs  until I’m too drained to care  which side they’re on. --- Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including  Escape Envy  (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021),  I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So , and  The Prisoners . His writing has appeared in  Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review,  and other journals. An ex-c

Why Men's Judgements of New Clothes Shouldn't Be Trusted by Simon Williams

I join four men outside the fitting room, while women try on size 14 with 16 in reserve. We’re trying to look in place and failing. It’s important not to let your eyes settle on any racked garment for over 30 seconds or any racked customer for over five. This is especially true if the fitting room in anywhere near lingerie. Nobody is interested in our slight discomfort; five expressionless faces keen to compress time, urgent to breathe less material air. People want to read Big Thoughts on how we were misused as boys, how we were louts on bikes. But it has come to this; such a longing for a brief appearance from the cubicle, a show-off of prospective wear that all clothes look wonderful on you. --- Simon Williams  has eight published collections, his latest being a co-authored pamphlet with Susan Taylor,  The Weather House , published in 2017 by Indigo Dreams. Simon was elected The Bard of Exeter in 2013, founded the large-format magazine,  The Broadsheet  a