One Poem - Sarah Chapman

AN AMERICAN PLACE I KEEP

Today, all that holds me together is

light/ in occasional parallel stripes

of girls wearing tinted sunglasses sucking

on a strawberry sherbet, bending their height

slightly to look at old magazine racks, and

although the word ‘mountain’ is never used,

hair is everywhere. The short men who stare

at cars order cigarettes/ boys coax gum

out of forty year machines. White fingerprints

of the check out man braise receipts that are

yellow in colour.

--

Sarah Chapman lives and works in the rough part of East London. She has been writing poetry for a year and has been published in Pomegranate and Spilt Milk.