On Returning to the Morrison’s Produce Department, August 2006
by and published in Edition One of Pomegranate
‘The lychee is the only fruit that smells just like it tastes’ – wisdom imparted in the after-closing hour
as I firth-of-forthed the salad aisle
and hated every lettuce groundlessly.
The packet sprung before my eyes like a coin
a cheap magician draws from a grudging ear – I found myself enveloped in strange arms;
turned to a smile fit for day-release.
My mind was not on managers and salad aisles,
when I was green in apron, cold in mind – it stayed like smoke in kitchen-flats in London,
where I made a hundred friends that I forgot
within a year; where I thought that I would act
but later knew that I would not, though
every box of nectarines had ‘RADA’ down the side;
where I kissed for the first time a girl
who knew what she was doing, though the morning
brought sobriety, a boyfriend, and we never
spoke again; and it ended, and the train
came home to rain and grey and nine-to-six
and productivity, where Mark ran with the trolley
to the warehouse, where he startled me with unfamiliar fruit,
and where his hair had all the sheen of a newly-polished apple
but his pupils were just pips inside his eyes.
Richard O'Brien
Richard O’Brien is one of Pomegranate’s two submissions editors. He likes to think of himself as Charlotte Geater’s glamourless assistant.
He was born in Peterborough in 1990 and has returned only for weddings and funerals since starting at Brasenose College Oxford in 2008. He has also returned for holidays.
His first pamphlet, ‘your own devices’, was published by tall-lighthouse press in 2009, and his first play ‘Instead of Beauty’ was the winner of the 2010 OUDS New Writing Festival. He enjoys the humiliation of directing autobiographical musicals. Other interests include travel, museums, travelling to museums, and walks on a long beach.