First Prize
Kathryn Simmonds

Sunday at the Skin Launderette

The weekly visit to the perfumed steam. Outside
rain falls biblically, a reminder of the duty to be clean.
Inside no one notices – they’re too busy with the work
of choosing a machine, counting change and making
sure the temperature’s just right, trying not to pour
the powder anywhere but in the slot. Other skin

begins revolving through the plastic portholes. Skin
of fine Thai origin, Kenyan and Jamaican skin beside
the bluish white, the tattooed, mottled and poor
stretch-marked stuff, every kind of hair licked clean.
A fat man doubles over on a bench – he’s making
heavy weather of it, separating folds, trying to work

his penis from its shell. It’s slow and careful work.
His lungs balloon as he un-sheathes his foreskin,
fragile as sushi, then the balls, until he’s making
progress, loosening his mass of satin arse. Beside
him a girl unpeels her arm, a glove which comes clean
off revealing sinews. The man squeezes his paw,

fatty and raw, gathers his acreage while the girl pours
a gloss of layers over her hips, pausing to work
around the knees, the difficult toes. The clean
fug of detergents is dizzying as she drapes her skin
over her arm like a silk evening gown. Beside
her an old woman undresses patiently, making

sure not to tear her cobweb elbows, making
sure the birth mark is preserved. She pauses
at her clavicle and strokes the scar on the side
of her brow, puckered like a wonky zip. She works
at this delicate undoing, unpeeling the skin
which is sheer as moth wing now, until her lean

frame hangs with crushed silk, the body coming clean
at last. So they sit waiting, staring into space, making
lists in their heads, watching the machines. While his skin
tumbles dry, the man examines his heart. The women pore
over their bodies, carefully lift their breasts to work
out once again where their souls are hiding. Outside

a skin of rain ripples the darkening streets as water pours
through gutters, pounding pavements clean, making
everything a sort of new, while the work goes on inside.

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Second Prize
Rachel Curzon

Happy Ending

The baby in the tree has cried all day.
There is nothing to suck on, up there.

At first he shrieked at everything green
and the climbing frame
and the way wind feels
but now he has run himself out with crying and crying
and he simply creaks.

Recently the sun tried to set
but long branches held it back,
tutting a little. It’s summer.
Days are meant to finish late.

Even so, the world dismantles
according to the rules.
Trains follow themselves home
and the football match is finishing.
Boys clatter their feet.

One by one, bay windows become interesting
as families show off amongst their cushions,
stretching and staring.

Had you forgotten the baby?
He fits a fist into his mouth
and tells a jogger on the towpath he is hungry.
In time he’ll know better than to appeal to joggers
but now those rhomboid calves winking away
are the worst thing to happen to the baby…

Evenings are so pitiless.
The sky sits on the goalposts to wait;
rooks listen from in amongst twigs.

And here,
here comes someone in her slippers
picking her way through the dandelions
and the quiet swings
reaching for the baby with a smile on her mouth
saying, Now will you hush now will you?

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Third Prize
Victor Tapner

Jacqueline Kennedy’s Guided Tour of the White House

The glasses are quite the prettiest,
aren’t they? From West Virginia.

When dinner guests take their seats
the candelabra catch the darks

of Lincoln’s frock coat in the crystal
and throw the baroque golds

of James Monroe’s centrepiece
against the ceiling’s perfect white.

It can crawl with extraordinary shapes:
one imagines a giant kaleidoscope

or being trapped in a Picasso.
Sometimes, here in the Red Room,

I sit at this little Lannuier table
and write my notes. You know,

I can almost hear the matron
at Miss Porter’s: ‘Posture, young lady’.

My favourite piece is by the door:
a Baltimore lady’s desk

of sandalwood and verre églomisé.
The legs need a special Mexican wax.

I’m told it takes a thousand bees
to make an ounce. These chairs

we re-upholstered in Morris velvet
at a Massachusetts studio:

Victorian green and Empire yellow.
You can fall in love with the history

as though you’ll never leave.
The Truman china I adore.

If a housemaid breaks a cup
it’s as though something of myself

has cracked. I’m impossible for hours.
There, at the end of the East Room,

we built the sweetest stage for Casals
to play for the laureates. Someone said

he could make the air grieve. Just here,
in spring, from these upper windows,

you can see the blossom, like a cake,
on Andrew Jackson’s magnolia trees.

I confess, after an early morning storm
I can’t bear to look: so many petals,

all torn, clinging to the panes.
Last, and most cherished, of course,

the Lincoln bed. One thinks of him
asleep between the brushed sheets,

those bony fingers on the coverlet,
his half smile and hollow cheeks.

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