Philip Rush

TELLING THE BEES

Dad was in his plush red
dressing gown.
He had been half-asleep all day.
The television was on
but the sound was down.
I held his eyes closely.
I hugged his eyes.
Phyllis, I said.
Your wife. My mum.
This all very slowly
like dictation
in a Shanghai
English lesson.
She’s not been very well.
A faint nod,
a faint agreement.
This evening, I said,
she has died.
The priest has been.
He gave her the sacrament.
We have said prayers,
made peace with God.
But mum is dead.
Oh. He said. Oh.
A slow motion screen
of the innards
of a mobile phone
showing the electrons
and their binary decisions
was being played
on his face.
Oh. He said. Oh.
And then,
I am a little
unstrung about that.

Philip Rush is the deputy head of St Peter’s High School, Gloucester, where he teaches in the English department. He has taught theatre studies for 20 years and for seven years led the postgraduate training scheme for trainee English and drama teachers at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham. He has a degree in English from Westfield College, University of London and an MA in drama from Bristol University. He has performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Philip Rush is the deputy head of St Peter’s High School, Gloucester, where he teaches in the English department. He has a degree in English from Westfield College, University of London and an MA in drama from Bristol University. He has performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and at the Torbay Poetry Festival.  His poetry has won prizes and, as he remarks, made a profession of coming second in competitions.

Deborah Moffatt

Of Boats and Bars

There were bars, on the island,
and boats, more bars than boats,
beginning in Finnegan’s, for lunch,
beer, for the adults, ginger ale, for us,
cigarette smoke clouding the afternoon,
the promise of the boat receding.

Between bars, there were boats,
entire days spent sailing on the Sound,
drinks on board around the wheel, for them,
while we, drunk on sea-spray and strong sun,
sat on the heeling deck, our legs dangling down
over the water, feet skimming the rising waves.

At night, there were discs of green phosphorus
floating in the dark water, and above the harbour
the neon lights of restaurants and bars: more drinks,
Scotch, for them, ice cream with Crème de Menthe, for us,
and at a piano, a man crooning love songs, sultry looks
burning through wreaths of smoke, romance in the air.
The next day there were recriminations and rumours
we weren’t meant to hear; they drank strong black coffee
at Finnegan’s, a blanket of smoke hanging heavy
overhead,
while we, bored, stared at posters on the wall – the
Rheingold Girls
and the Yankees, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle – or,
ignored,
slipped outside to look at the boat, waiting for the clouds
to lift.

Finally, there was the long trip home in the car, heading
north
through diesel reek to a place where there were no bars,
only genteel drinks behind closed doors, and no boats,
no sea, only green pastures and trees, and in the back
seat
we would sit in sullen silence, sucking salt from our hair
and dreaming of an island romance, of boats, and bars.

Deborah Moffatt was born and raised in Norwich, Vermont, USA. Her home was seven miles out of town on a dirt road that went nowhere. Trees and cows were her immediate neighbours. In 1982 Deborah travelled to Scotland, and soon settled there, having married a Scot. She now lives in Kingsbarns, a small village near St. Andrews, Fife. She has a demanding garden and a huffy cat.

Emily Wills

The Syllabus

It was easy at first, amo, amas, sweet Miss Bee
all talcum and bosoms, but after her came wars,
Gallic and otherwise, and Creepy Crawford
cockeyed in his built-up shoe, his spitty mouth
yodelling declensions to the barbarians.

For we were the dumb-at-grammar girls,
ignorant of feminine endings, how everything
had to agree, and only for him we’d unroll
our bunched-up skirts, so dowdy pleats
could actually touch our knees.

Sniggering behind split ends, we wondered
if he’d been born like that, or dropped
from an unforgiving height, but didn’t ask
if he really had showed Sandra whatever it was
he kept in the stationery cupboard.

We didn’t question when he halted the Gauls
mid-forage, so we could act out that play
in which we were the Spartan women withholding sex
while he took all the men’s parts, including the chorus,
and made Sandra the virgin slave.

These days it would be headline stuff: back then
we sweated into our nylon shirts, were merely relieved
when only a few pages before the women gave in
the tedious Gauls unditched themselves, resumed
their laying waste right up to O level. We sat it out

behind the ramparts of those back-row desks,
too drilled in Latinate vocabulary to ask
why it took two terms when it wasn’t on the syllabus
or even funny. And even now we’re not much good
at disagreeing, or getting the joke, or asking what
exactly we’ll be marked on in the end.

Emily Wills has two collections, Diverting the Sea (2000) and Developing the Negative (2008), and a pamphlet, Unmapped (2014), all published by The Rialto. Her work has been shortlisted for the Manchester poetry prize, and commended in the Troubadour and Hippocrates competitions. She won the Frogmore prize in 2012 and 2013. She lives in Gloucestershire where she works as a GP.

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