City of Winds
John McCullough

And I bound along the prom, fizzing from your text.
You’re dreadful, making me so reckless—the distant slap
of a flip-flop and whoosh   here I go again       kiting        
off to the bandstand   or higher regions of the air.         

In this world without objects       a basketball is its bounce
wet stones become their shine   deep colours I could enter
curl up in for years.       The wind is pure smell       ventures
over oceans   just to reach the grubby motel       of my lungs.         

Lover, when I step       on solid tarmac after pebbles        
it seems the ground is restless   and I’m attuned to centuries
buildings passing through   each rock’s migration        
sky, ice-cream and wasps       collapsing  reforming         

reliving their time in stars.       Meanwhile, we dwell
in seconds.       I leave the beach and it carries on without me
as it always does.       You appear beside the café

luminous, terrible—winding me back to your mouth.

John McCullough’s poems have appeared in places including Poetry Review, London Magazine, The Guardian, Poetry London and Best British Poetry. His first collection The Frost Fairs (Salt, 2011) won the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Book of the Year for The Independent and The Poetry School, and a summer read for The Observer. This poem is taken from his forthcoming second collection Spacecraft, to be published by Penned in the Margins in May.

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