AA tutor Claire Potter’s poem, Slow Corsage, has been published in New Statesman:

A tall man on the five-thirty train nursed a loaf of bread in the crook of his gabardine elbow that claimed the finest taste on the label and as the train slowed into Kilburn Station the tall man tilted off the carriage, passed through the barriers with neatly turned bow-legs and untangled with a spare hand but without disturbing the bread, a length of navy coast twisted between his knees, a gesture inducing the question of whether the finest taste was the bread until I got home and put my things down and saw almost spell-like, within filaments of vanishing light, the first camellia of spring sitting as a white brooch in a thatch of emerald leaves (that I occasionally polished) and I became distracted from any trace of the tall man with the bread upon whose lapel, given the chance, I might have pinned a day-old camellia.

View the poem here.

Image: Photo by De Agostini via Getty Images