The Towerblock by Sam Szanto

On the high street, I pass by to-let signs

and newborn shops, pregnant women and

monster prams. On the Embankment,

teenage girls screech and seagulls shrill,

a mother breastfeeds on a bench. Then I’m

on Putney Heath, where people once fought

duels, you said, The Kings’ Head where

we had Sunday lunch with my friends, the dead

leaves springing to life beneath my feet.

In Southfields, the once-used launderette,

the primary school that wasn’t needed,

Skeena Hill which I tore up the day it ended.

I’m on the estate confronting the Brutalist

towerblock, nothing and everything the same.

A woman walks out of the main door,

I dust-mote in. The lift still smells of weed

and wee, I rise to the ninth floor, fear smeared

on my bare arms and legs, pause at our front

door, blood-red, two discoloured gold numbers, the

mezuzah we inherited replaced by

nothing. On the shared balcony I stare through

the chicken-wire veil, at London displayed

like a dissected bride. The lift doors open

and a man gets out who doesn’t notice me.

Sam Szanto lives in Durham, UK. Her poetry pamphlet 'This Was Your Mother' was one of the winners of the 2023 Dreich Slims Contest. Her collaborative pamphlet, ‘Splashing Pink’, was published by Hedgehog Press and is a Poetry Book Society Winter Pamphlet Choice. She won the 2020 Charroux Poetry Prize and the Twelfth First Writer International Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in journals including ‘Northern Gravy’, ‘The North’ and ‘The Storms’. She has an MA in Writing Poetry with Distinction from the Poetry School. Her short story collection, ‘If No One Speaks’, was published by Alien Buddha Press.