Alex Scarborough

Good grief

I took a four-pack of lukewarm beer and a kitchen stool
to the shower and sat there
as the water, building up to scalding,
drummed over the moles on my shoulders
steam whitewashed my eyes —

her, strutting through glass doors
in her space boots
sternum-first into whatever room
she decided to fill

a beach somewhere, the air blistering,
her spinning, teeth chattering, laughing
at something I've already lost

a paper bag left on the counter —
my birthday —
as I reheated her morning tea

the first I love you
the last I love you
from separate beds

I tilt my head back into the water
until there's nothing left to see

Our Boy William

It was all in the papers:
the uppercut, the railings, 
his bones against the bent, 
his body folding into the sea. 

But here he is, spooning at his cereal
blue as the water that swallowed him.

We found him skulking  
outside the chip shop on Le-Sands – 
puddles curdling under his heels – 
We brought him home for some tea.

Weeks pass. The floorboards warp.  
We bought a tumble dryer, run it endlessly. 
Picking crab shells from his jumper still.

His sister won’t touch him.
At the pub, his mates lean in to hear
the punchlines that drown in his throat.

We’ve stopped asking what came back.
We still pour him tea. We still call him Billy.
The corridors have started sounding like the sea.

Alex Scarborough is a poet from Hertfordshire, UK and currently based in Sydney. He studied song writing at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in London. His work was recently highly commended for the Poetry Wales Award and has appeared in Ink, Sweat & Tears and Full House Literary. He is currently working on his first pamphlet.

Alex had this to say about these poems:

Officer — cuff me. Because I did actually write this one after drinking a beer in the shower. But the beer is beside the point. ‘Good Grief’ looks at what memories survive loss. You want to cherish the good ones, but the crueller ones will always hang around. Sadly, grief doesn’t really let you pick and choose. Standing in the shower letting the water run over you felt like the right image for that. You can try to wash everything away, but you don't get to keep just the good parts. It’s all or nothing.

The starting point for ‘Our Boy William’ was an idea about resurrection — essentially what happens if grief runs backwards. What if the person we mourned somehow comes back? I think the people left behind would still be carrying everything the loss did to them, and the returned person would have to fit themselves back into a life that had already started grieving without them. The poem is really about that effort to get back to “normal”, and how desperate people become chasing something that used to be there.