Fiddling the Gas
Angela Readman

My father never gave me the stars, but he came
to my first flat to knock the moon on its back.
I let him in, snow on his hair fusing to grey as he bent
on one knee and I offered him coffee – a stranger,
a daughter, unsure what to say. It seems we waited
for the plumber all our lives, my mother and I inched
through sleeping bag Decembers, peered into hatches
at dead boilers, the light blown out of their eyes.
He drilled the cast and smeared black wax on the hole
to disguise our partnership in crime. It was like skating
on Saturn, the way we gazed at the dial. Just once,
the world span on a flipped coin in our pockets, simple
as stopped clocks in our hands. Together, we knelt to see
steel turn out winter, the meter rolling back time.

Angela Readman's short story collection Don't Try This at Home won The Rubery Book Award in 2015. Her poetry has won the Mslexia Poetry Competition, The Charles Causley, and The Essex Poetry Prize. Nine Arches are publishing her collection The Book of Tides in November this year.

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