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WOMEN'S POETRY COMPETITION: RUNNER-UP MARLO BESTER-SPROUL

Malika Booker highlighted the way Marlo Bester-Sproul's Therapy uses tightly controlled tercets to mirror the power dynamic of therapist and patient in this dark, compelling poem, drawing attention to particularly artful imagery such as: 'when they crack like egg', 'their papery, papery shells' and 'the sheer weight of them between his fingers.'

  

Therapy 

  

He likes them naked –

their moth white throats,

the way they pull their coats closer against them.

 

The way, sometimes, their breath

in the middle of a sentence, stops short

as a girl in a carpark.

 

Come on, what are you afraid of?

His hand, and the right paradigm,

placed just so.

 

It’s usually enough. 

When it isn’t he jots paranoia,    

hyper-active imagination.

 

He likes them naked –

feels thick with pleasure when they crack like eggs

there behind the Venetian blinds

 

there in the hush of his own small office,

with dust falling like white noise

and their papery, papery shells

 

the sheer weight of them

between his fingers.

 

 

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