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Mama Mada
They Said It Would Change by Ke vin Re id
School bus fare was a three penny piece,
or as grown-ups would say, a thrup ny bit.
Kathy, the school bus conductress, the familiar
bundles of brass coins in her verdigris hands.
School rulers were wooden with black lines. Mrs. McCourt
had a thing about pencil’s being sharp when used with a ruler.
I couldn’t decide which side of the line was the true measure.
With a folding ruler, and a pencil behind his ear,
my dad questioned me in feet and inches. I didn’t
understand eighths and sixteenths till my late teens.
At school, it was a kilogram and a litre,
at home, a bag of sugar, a pint of milk.
These days, road signs still read miles-per-hour,
and it’s ok to say I’m five foot seven inches tall.
Brass became copper, the portcullis remained and
piggy banks are not the same; some not even pigs.
Dancing by Lind a Black
Can be done at any time, mathematically speaking. A child in the front
row, she sees the Prince’s laddered tights. This opens up and widens her.
In her grandparent’s house, at the end of a terrace, up a hill you get to
through Gledhow Valley Woods, next to a parade where the green-
grocer has straw on the floor, she sees an advert on the television for a
delicious Bounty bar and the next minute her grandfather’s giving her
the money and she’s dancing to the sweet shop across the dual
carriageway.
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