Girls in the City by Charlie Bowden
Have they heard the bad news?
Do they know about the world underwater,
the flowering West End fear being pranced about
from peer to peer, a few phases down from being truly reared?
A host of miracles wouldn’t be near enough
to match the majority of sneers which cluster in the House.
Which house, you say, dear? Does it matter?
They’re separate worlds connected by gardens of beer.
To bottle time is a frantic science, or so I’ve heard,
from the bowels of the bird cages where old men seek a third.
They won’t catch them though with snare or sneer,
the girls impervious to summer and skies that die clear.
They feast on cod in the city centre,
no lecture carved out on their tongues,
almost gods, given up on time’s lender,
headed from heaven to Oxfordshire.
“‘Girls in the City’ was inspired by stereotypical social media posts of life in the city which are frequently mocked as being almost oblivious to the real world; I sought to turn that on its head by presenting them as the only ones who felt happy in a world of doom-mongers. It underwent numerous revisions as I tweaked the idea but eventually I decided to leave it because otherwise it would soon lose the essence of that original idea.”
Charlie Bowden (he/him) is a student from Hampshire, England, who discovered a love for writing poetry in lockdown after spending years studying it at school. His work has been included in collections by Young Writers and the Stratford Literary Festival among others and he won the 2021 Forward/emagazine Creative Critics Competition. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @charliebpoetry for more.