Golden Hour
The air ambulance is here.
Its white paunch
presses into the field
disturbs the suburban air
as two men run towards me
and the glittering windscreen
and my unwashed jeans.
Look at them
so drunk on purpose
pursued by a cloud of verbs:
manage, manipulate, perform, insert…
They call it the Golden Hour
and I don’t want it.
I want the cheap metal minutes
that scratch at your skin
when the rust infects
to a kind of peace.
For a moment I almost give in
as they wrap
bandages and words
– love and sweetheart – around my limbs.
On a stretcher
they raise me above the crowds.
I wish they could lower me
into the mulch
behind the old swings
bin the cut jeans and the empty syringe
have an extra Marlborough on the long way home.
Alexandra Price (Née Masters) is a poet, farmer and mother. She studied at the University of London and then went on to work as a journalist and teacher.
For over a decade she was a freelance book critic for the national press, including The Economist, The TLS and The Observer, and was invited to be a judge for The Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize. During this time, she also founded BookSmoke, which was dedicated to promoting and hosting literary events in London (‘The Big Smoke’).
She has also taught ex-prisoners creative writing and poetry and spent extensive time volunteering for the charity English PEN – which runs campaigns for imprisoned writers and poets.
After living in London for nearly a decade, Alex moved with her family to the countryside where she currently works on a farm with vulnerable adults. Her poems have been published or forthcoming in The Friday Poem, Dodging the Rain, The Amphibian, and Riverstone Literary Journal. She is represented by United Agents and is working on her first poetry Collection: Woman at Noon.