Dear Former Valentine
Before you and I were lovers
we were friends, and once
I slept at your house near the airport
before a pre-dawn flight.
When you drove me to the terminal
I observed your beautiful wrists
and decisive gear changes.
With the collisions still to come
(that garden in the Val d’Orcia,
you peeling oranges for me,
the bed we broke in San Francisco,
the curdling, the sourness)
that night remains: chaste, wakeful.
I remember a Star Wars duvet cover
washed to threadbare softness,
and a red plastic alarm clock.
Sarah Stewart writes children’s books under the name Sarah Forbes and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is a 2019 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize finalist and her pamphlet Glisk won the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award. Her pamphlet Foreign & Domestic was Highly Commended in the Mslexia/Bloodaxe Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2023.