The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

 Tiffany Atkinson

 Photo from Belfast

I knew him, the dead boy, Michael.
Only for three hours, maybe, taken in all.
He stopped me for a light outside my local-
I fell for the accent, the smile. I’d no particular errand
That August Saturday, and stood him a pint.
It was one of those conversations you have perhaps
twice in your life; in full-flash, polaroid.
I was the one took his picture on the Queen’s Road,
after he took mine. We were both half-cut by then.
The car was a chunk of dark, behind and to his right.
Blue, maybe black, dead shiny. I’d a new pair of jeans on;
I’d clocked my shape in its panels on the way in.

I’d have stayed for the fourth pint, only
I was mulling over a pair of spike-heels I’d taken
a shine to a while back. Truth is,
when the car put a root of white heat through the tarmac,
made light of the pub, and punched out the street
in a riptide of splinters, I was three blocks east
with his number tucked in my backside pocket
and my heart set on a pair of fuck-me shoes;

and that has a way of shifting your focus,
making you rethink your image. Since I heard
they’d turned up his camera, since I saw the footage,
I’ve been framing everything in split-seconds;
Shutter-speeds, degrees of exposure. I develop him
nightly from the reeling dark-each particular fluke
of space, time, matter. You’d not think it difficult,
to filter him down through the pinhole of morning,
to bring him back to light, to get the picture. 

Tiffany Atkinson has lived in Wales since 1993 when she came to Cardiff University as a postgraduate student. She is now a lecturer in English at Aberystwyth University. Since starting to write she has won the BBC Radio Young Poet of the Year Competition in 1993 and 1994, and the Ottakar’s and Faber Poetry Competition in 2000. She hasn’t yet published much poetry, but is working on it.