Back to Issue Ten.

An Evening at The Crown

BY SARAH FLETCHER

 

The tongue, which is
the stethoscope of love,
is searching for a pulse
among the bottles.

It’s nestled in the mouth
of the young boy who
served me rum. Drunkenness
is everywhere. The trees
have let their branches
out like limbs, the whores.
They stumble in the wind.

My kiss has slipped off
like a dress. It keeps
on unpeeling itself, a gift.
I tell the boy his body
is a language and I want
to learn it. An addict

for his dialect, I mourn it
when it slithers back
into the bar to fill its gut
with more black beer.
My tongue back in my mouth
like some small bird,
love running from me
like a feral deer.

Sarah Fletcher is a British-American poet studying at Durham University and living in London. She was named a 2012 Foyle Young Poet of the Year, has received the 2012 and 2013 Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes, and has been shortlisted for the Stephen Spender Prize and Bridport Prize. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and displayed at Olympic Park, and appears in The London Magazine, The Morning Star, and Word Riot, as well as in anthologies with The Emma Press and Eyewear Publishing. She is the author of the forthcoming pamphlet Kissing Angles (Dead Ink, 2015).