Reunion
I saw that she had moved into the disused stables.
Under a dangling bulb in the second stall
she was playing her trombone. I opened the gate
and watched her slide the gold tubes up and down.
It was your second-best solo in Band, I told her.
She sat down hard on a hay bale, studying
the cement floor. Her boots were farm boots,
like you'd see on an old peat digger in Sligo.
I asked her if she still loved Jesus,
what it might take for us to be friends again.
A phantom stallion kicked the adjoining wall.
I wanted hair like yours, I said, I didn't understand
about you and your father. She looked up then,
just a little, and her forehead wore
my wrinkles like a bridle, and I thought
about the height of a horse, how it's measured
in hands, and all the saddles tacked to the wall
with nothing to ride on. Cassie, we survived,
I said, they've put us out to pasture. She played
a last flurry of notes and emptied her spit valve,
pulled the hanging cord and turned out the light.
Eve Ellis is an American poet and educator based in London. She holds an MA in Creative Writing and Education from Goldsmiths and was a member of the London Library Emerging Writers Programme from 2022-23. Eve won the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Women Poets Prize in 2020. Twice longlisted for the National Poetry Competition, Eve's poems have appeared in Magma, Poetry Wales, Propel, and And Other Poems.
Spit Valve is a striking debut pamphlet, weaving uncanny, imagined worlds alongside vulnerability, memory and silence. We loved the variety of form in the pamphlet and the sticky, vibrant imagery used within.
