Alison Binney

Distance

the carrots my brother buys are the wrong ones
dad tells me so he had to go to the supermarket
we’ve told him not to go to where he waited
half an hour outside chatting to a lovely girl
he doesn’t know what all the fuss is about loo roll
I’m trying to find new ways to say you can walk
to the shops and back just don’t go inside
is it worth risking your life for carrots I think
of the shopping basket handle how long he takes
to choose the people reaching round breathing
the queue for the till the couple he will have
befriended in front I ask if he washes
his hands as soon as he gets home but he wants
to tell me about the robins’ nest above the back door
so I tell him about the moorhen chicks
and for the rest of the call we offer up birds
into the sixty miles thirty years between us
his saying let me go mine saying dad don’t die

Alison Binney is an English teacher and poet from Cambridge, where she teaches both in a state secondary school and on the PGCE English course. Her debut pamphlet, Other Women’s Kitchens, won the 2020 Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition and was published by Seren Books in September 2021. She was recently runner-up in the Mairtin Crawford Award for poets working towards a first full collection.