Ode to my childhood friend Sharon
I’m not scared of the boys hiding in the bushes
but there’s mean old Mac
She told me in the night
he creeps half-baked
into her bedroom
trying to peel her
Because we are ten minutes late
Mac grabs one leg sweeping her high
I can still hear her cries the crisp crack
of tender skin
see her kick her legs
until she pees
down
his trouser leg
She tries to ignore all the names
he calls her
but they continued to sink
deep into her fat.
Later, her husband will grow spuds
ploughing
under
blue & yellow wild flowers
until they bloom
on her
cheekbone.
Now her family sit in their
brown-eyed cockerel kitchen
looking like Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters.
Kathleen Strafford is a student at Trinity University in Leeds studying for her MA in creative writing. She hopes her first collection of poetry will be published this coming year after graduation. She has been published in magazines & online: Interpreter’s House, Butcher’s Dog, Fat Damsel, Ink Sweat and Tears, Panoply, and various anthologies.