BUNSHOP Poem by Mario Petrucci

Startle-eyed, me and she, in the bunshop
where fourth-formers tried on cool

like over-sized blazers, lipsticked
with doughnut sugar and jam, and girls

gave little swivels in checked skirts,
dipping liquorice in lemon sherbet.

I peered into the deep pile of her mop,
saw white crumbs of scalp. Smelt sulphur.

First detention ever, for using perchlorate
to singe her initials in benchwood.

Mr Grant: pissy lab coat, jaundiced
coot, grimace in a dough of face, thread

of custard forever stranded between
dummy lips - Use your loaf boy.

Too late. Hovering behind the homework
each night: her marooned complexion, those

small white teeth. That sulphurous perfume.
End of term. Her hand in my pocket

my éclair in the other, I blew it.
Three stupid words. I'm a Catholic.

The shop - a delicatessen now. The school
long since converted. Yet, hanging round

the drains, something still of Mr Grant
and her - that whiff of coconut mat

in her blouse, his nicotined lard of finger
and thumb, the spatula pinched between

dipped in the tart yellow of that test tube:
Make a note boys. Sulphur. Flowers of.