A BAKER’S PUNNET
by and published in Edition Four of Pomegranate
i)
There is nothing I would like more now
than a nectarine, a nectarine I’d share
with the stony-hearted restaurant inspector
arriving in fifteen minutes to shut us down.
ii)
I was once the world-beater at thieving
nectarines, twelve or thirteen at a time
from Portbello Road, till a greengrocer
wrenched my left arm right out of the socket.
iii)
What was the stage-name of that Thirties conjuror
Barbara hated, whose piece de resistance
was pulling the stone from a nectarine
without breaking the skin?
iv)
Under a hail of nectarine-stones,
my top-hatted ancestor
fled the ring of the most lacklustre
Big Top in Lancashire.
v)
Meanwhile, Mosley rallied the troops:
‘The Judaic Octopus hunts down gentile children
for blood-rites’ – while nectarine juice
drip-dripped from his chin to his boots.
vi)
That nectarine we shared on our field-trip picnic
to Romsley Park, where comparing our teethmarks
was close as I came
to her still-locked lips, her still-pouting mouth.
vii)
Off-set on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’,
Ringo almost splits up the Beatles
a full decade early by punting a nectarine
at John – which misses, rolls off to another dimension.
viii)
A fruitbat stalks on its pinions
over the foil-wrapped sleeping refugees, to the kid
with the Red Cross nectarine
and begins to silently kiss away at the globe.
ix)
O’Malley discovered the Mayor’s son
slumped over his tins of nectarine and sardine – asphyxiated in the airtight
fallout shelter.
x)
Lain on my stripped bed, listening in
to the pair behind the pasteboard wall,
I thought of my lover crushing a nectarine
between her thighs, and the sweet-stained leather.
xi)
Also a nectarine laid on the train-track
between somewhere else and Gdansk – the train’s so late
it’s rotten before it’s run over.
xii)
Also the nectarine everyone thought was a firebomb
when it smashed through the window
of Southport Vetinary Surgery
and the broken-winged toucan awked furiously.
xiii)
The hostage-taker demands the best nectarine sorbet
flown in from Seville or Coimbra;
above him balaclaved soldiers creep
through his restaurant’s upstairs echelons.
John Clegg
John Clegg was born in 1986 and studies for a PhD in Durham. Some of his poems are featured in the upcoming Salt Book of Younger Poets, as well as Succour, The Rialto, Mercy and online at Pomegranate. His e-chapbook Advancer is published by Silkworms Ink, and a full collection is forthcoming from Salt.