Carole Bromley – four poems

Dinner parties

I’d leave my knickers off
put on black suspenders
and watch you suffer
through the grilled grapefruit,
the moussaka, the orange cheesecake.

Then I’d slip out of one high heel
and tease you with my stockinged foot
while you handed round blue nun.

Somehow the washing up
never got done.

Amuse-bouche

I would have liked to amuse your mouth,
would have loved to hear you order
Osso Buco in your dark red voice

while I chose some light, exotic dish
of asparagus, goats cheese or fig
and rolled the stem of my champagne flute.

Baci

Do they make them any more,
those kisses of silky milk chocolate
with a poem in the twisted wrapper?

I would like to open one now,
find a line from a love poem
and feel it dissolve on my tongue.

New Year

The world was the consistency of pavlova
the morning you walked away;

you crushed it with your first-footing
out over the threshold

and for days it relented a little, then made its mind up,
froze over

till, after a week, your footprints had gone
as if they’d never been

and the pillow where you’d laid your head
plumped itself again

until even the smell of you had dispersed
into the cold air.

I might have thought I’d dreamt it all
except for your glass, your cup,

that particular smell the air has just before
the first flake falls.

Carole Bromley’s first collection, A Guided Tour of the Ice House, was published by Smith/Doorstop in 2012. She writes a regular poetry blog at www.yorkmix.com and is currently judging the YorkMix/York Literature Festival Poetry Competition (deadline 28 Feb). Her website is at www.carolebromleypoetry.co.uk

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