Steve Pottinger is a founding member of Wolverhampton arts collective Poets, Prattlers, and Pandemonialists. He’s an engaging and accomplished performer who has performed the length and breadth of the country. His work regularly appears online in CultureMatters and the Morning Star, and has won prizes or been commended in Bread & Roses, Prole, Poetry on Loan, Plough, Guernsey International, Arran, Verve, and Poets & Players poetry competitions. His sixth volume of poems, ‘thirty-one small acts of love and resistance’ published by Ignite Books, is out now.
THE POLSKI SKLEP HAS CLOSED ITS DOORS
for the last time. And this morning
in the June heat, men are hauling
the awkward empty bulk of chiller units
from shop to pavement to truck,
already sweating. Cursing in a language
we claim we do not understand
but speak too well. A lexicon
of loss and hurt and pain,
the job that disappears
a ladder climbed that turns
to snake again. Small dreams stuffed
in plastic bags in overflowing bins.
On the other side of Market Square,
where the breeze cools, we stand
idle in shade, and watch.
The lad next to me is smiling,
confusing the hammer falling
– for once – elsewhere,
with something like a win.
© Steve Pottinger.
Essential Information
Steve Pottinger's sixth volume of poems, 'thirty-one small acts of love and resistance' is available now from Ignite Books, find it here.
