“Ex-Industrial (a trailer)”: a poem by Helen Mort

By Helen Mort

Zoom in: near sunset in a town where everything’s ex-this,

ex-that, an artificial pond poured in to fill the gaps.

Just out of shot, your neighbour the ex-smoker smokes

behind the flats and feels ex-touches shivering down his back.

Interior: your ex-face in that photo on the shelf

is less than half the shadow of your former self.

Crowned with a plastic rose, the TV’s talking to itself.

A coat pools on the floor. Real shadows take the walls by stealth.

Zoom out: that man-made lake again. The fishermen

and geese have left, the sun slinks off towards the west.

The camera pans across the water, comes to rest –

and there: the sun beneath the surface holds its breath.

Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985. Her debut collection, Division Street, was published by Chatto & Windus in September and has been shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and the T S Eliot Prize. Mort’s poetry is informed by the post-industrial landscape of north Derbyshire, where she grew up (she is the current poet laureate for Derbyshire). Asked what inspires her work, she said: “I think a lot of poetry comes from a kind of greed – a longing for the lives you haven’t led, the places you haven’t lived.” “Ex-Industrial (a trailer)” is previously unpublished.