Poetry by Mary Senier

                ​ricky shore CC



Two Towns

You will shortly be arriving in: Aberystwyth sliding her train doors wide, welcomes me back to my sea-grin town. Luggage slapped down on the platform’s warm rain pattering, wheeled away. Travel grime smeared over concrete.

I am home but not home. I exist between places, dreaming in tickets and seat trays, carriages coffee in thin paper cups. The sea bit a cleft out of coastline, called it Aber, pebbled its people and prom shops with shingle churned up by the waves. My key fits a lock not Stourbridge.

Stourbridge swells back beneath soil heaped bellying sky, screams coal at my back for its leaving. Box her out on one of my beds, back of my lids screening blurred reels – scenery sliding, fading, fields torn fast from a book.

I don’t know why I’m running but it feels like standing still; scarecrowed on track slats and stations of smoke, tethered umbilically, tugged between thin paper towns.
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Mary Senier (she/her) is a poet from the Black Country. She has poems in Abergavenny Small Press, The Alchemy Spoon, Ample Remains, Re-Side, Fahmidan Journal, The Madrigal, Journal of Erato, Postscript, and Tealight Press.

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