A Poem by Jo Bratten

Love Bites

If you’ve got love in your sights
Watch out, love bites
Def Leppard

We never spoke to the boys in our hometown, their smeared 
local faces fleering by the window edge: the Nates and Jareds 
all rat-tailed and denimed, Chads and Brads stacked for the field, 
the inevitable Kenny who hickeyed his own freckled neck 
with the end of the vacuum tube. The stink of sulphur 
on those hot spring mornings when winds from the mills 
brought bouquets of benzene, manganese, arsenic and acrolein: 
we fluttered in frills of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,
our muses torn from magazine pages, kissed in ardent pink, 
hid in bubblegummed stashes, brought out at holy midnight only
when we plugged in to the profane forbidden beats of rock fm
and whispered the words like faithful anchorites. On Fridays
the roller rink hummed like Valhalla and we clomped 
in second-hand skates, stuck close to the fingermarked walls,
buoyed up and in we ventured, further and closer to the boys
who skate backwards, who pulse like disco balls in sweaty
t-shirts; our saints sashaying in the sound system, we sing
like faithful cenobites till a boy in rewind sidles by, heaves 
his heart into his mountain dewy mouth and says his friend 
likes you. We coil away leaving a piece of supercilious side-eye
and wait for the parley, which never comes. In our room 
we set up our altar and pray in silence, like faithful stylites,
for lovers worthy of our hairsprayed hearts, ponder mysteries
beneath jeans and leather, search the sacred airwaves for a song 
to tell us how love lives and dies, begs and pleads, bites and bleeds.

Jo Bratten’s poetry has been widely published, with recent work in The Rialto, The North, Under the Radar, and Poetry Birmingham amongst others. Her debut pamphlet, Climacteric, was published by Fly on the Wall Press in September 2022. Originally from the USA, Jo completed a PhD at the University of St Andrews and lives in London.