Jenny Hockey

When I lived alone among others,

none of us spoke. I’d make do, wash
in the Belfast sink, sometimes shower
at the office, heat up stuff on a single hob,
always too much for one.

When I moved in there wasn’t a fork
or knife or spoon. I stole them from Nando’s
even before I made up the bed, even before
I checked for a bulb in the overhead light.

Some days I’d leave for work, some days I’d sing
to the backs of old men, left-behind men who lived
upstairs and set off every day — always a tired cap,
a bag in the claw of a hand.

Some days I’d lie on the floor, flatten myself
among dusty ghosts, tenants gone to ground.
I’d press my arm to the carpet, releasing
a frozen joint, popping a shoulder bone

in a villa where men who traded in iron
had paid for the prospect of fresh-air fields —
in a room with a plywood door
that juddered whenever my neighbour knew

her fella would have to go,
a lad I pictured in denim and studs
who’d howl from the scrub of lawn,
pleading for one more chance.

Some of my days were filled with sun,
pressing itself to my window, eager to sprawl
among papers and jam on a table for eight,
a table I opened as wide as I could.

Jenny Hockey is a Sheffield poet and former academic. In 2013 New Writing North awarded her a New Poets Bursary. After magazine and anthology publications since 1985, Oversteps Books published her collection, Going to bed with the moon in 2019. jennyhockeypoetry.co.uk

Jenny wrote the following about ‘When I lived alone among others’:

After many years of family life and parenting, I finally found full-time work but had to commute on a weekly basis to a city that grew up too fast on the iron and steel industry and was in serious decline. The poem describes my lodgings there and evokes the grim quality of my fellow tenants’ lives.