The sign promises eggs & abuse;
here, downtown Vancouver,
where the streets are griddles in the sun
and Brian, part-proprietor, part disco-queen,
goes pivoting around the room, laden
with omelettes, insults, syrup jars.
Get off your ass and fill the cup yourself.
I earn more tips here than a pole dancer.
You want to lick that clean for me?
And yes, we want to order everything:
the over-easy and the sunny-side,
French toast as thick as ‘War and Peace’,
the flying-saucer pancakes, bacon fleets.
We want to taste the urban trees,
the surely-sugared beach, to lick
the mouth of Horseshoe Bay,
the ice-cream coloured mountain tops
the silver flanks of the apartment blocks,
to drink the harbour that returns
the city’s stare. We want the lot,
but when it comes, the landscape
piling up in front of us, we place our hands
over our cups and Brian smirks to hear us say
I’m sorry and I just can’t manage this.
Helen Mort was born in Sheffield and lives in Chesterfield. She has published two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse press, the shape of every box (2007) and a pint for the ghost (2010) and her first full collection Division Street is forthcoming from Chatto & Windus. From 2011-12, she was Poet in Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. Helen has published poems in The Spectator, Poetry Review, Agenda and The Manhattan Review and has appeared on Radio 3’s The Verb. She is studying towards a PhD at Sheffield University and blogs about poetry and cognitive science here.
Photo from Dave Goldstein
24.12.2012
The Elbow Room Café
Poetry
By Helen Mort
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Situated in the north of England, Sheffield built its fame after the industrial revolution on its stainless steel production. Since the decline of the steel industry, it’s better known for producing earthy but heart-warming tales about male strippers (at least that’s what we understand from The Full Monty). But Sheffield is also the birthplace of Helen Mort, a poet whose work contains a tensile strength which allows her to layer images onto a structure without it breaking. Often tempered with a dash of the wry humor for which the north is known, Mort’s poems are sensually and emotively evocative of the people, places and situations she describes. As with the breakfast in The Elbow Room Café, this dish of verse is so real you can taste it.
03.12.2012
TPR Is Poetry
09.11.2012
