Rob McClure

Pillbox

She peered through the slit at a silent sea,
cracked wise about our enfilading fire,
finding the Vickers spurt of our desire
too sporadic to keep the Fife coast free
firefight nights we fought to iron out kinks,
quaffing Quaaludes like caramel candies,
strung out numb on her matchbook blue mandies,
fucking in that pillbox near Lundin Links.
Lost love, if only you had been gunshy
of crumbling bunkers dark & dangerous
& blackout nights you found me a fun guy
when false friend in fact I was a fungus
spored stone high but never became the I
might unearth to see a future for us.

Rob McClure’s work has appeared most recently in Poetry Scotland, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Birmingham, Anthropocene, Orbis and Flyway and he was a 2025 winner of the McCash Poetry Prize. He is the author of The Violence (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2018) and The Scotsman (Black Springs Press, 2024).

Rob wrote this about his poem:

The speaker recalls a teenage relationship unfolding in one of the crumbling wartime pillboxes that dot the Fife coast, his nostalgia tinctured by intimations of addiction and the early death of the lover. Maybe he suffers survivor's guilt, having himself left the pillbox behind: maybe he is just a consummate arsehole. If the poem were autobiographical, the poet might know. Since a pillbox is an outdated defensive structure permitting only entrance of a sliver of light, the sonnet structure seems appropriate for the subject matter.