We delighted in sneaking
two whole bottles of home-made
ginger beer, still fermenting,
from her warm dark cupboard.
Sneaked them while still cloudy,
root and yeast excited with sugar,
too young for sediments to settle.
Angry when poured so early,
broth kicking in the bottles,
broth and brother
bubbling with disco energy.
Bellies bloated,
daring each other:
drink more, belch louder, fart smellier.
Fizzing in our mouths,
Chimneying up inside our heads,
volcanoes gushing
down out of our noses onto the carpet.
Gingered, tingling
with the dioxide of laughter.
Hush!
Her key’s in the lock.
In his youth before the invention of Amazon, excess packaging and parcel tape, Stuart Larner worked in a book warehouse and learnt all the despatcher’s knots for tying up book parcels with string. Subsequently he became a psychologist and wrote scientific papers, articles, stories, poems and novels, and plays. He has written an ebook in verse “Jack Daw and the Cat”; a novel about cricket entitled “Guile and Spin”: and with Rosie Larner, as Rosy Stewart, the novel “Hope: Stories from a Women’s Refuge”. He wrote the illustrated sonnet sequence “The Car” in 2016. He won the British Psychological Society’s Poetry Competition 2021. For more poetry and stories, see his blog. https://stuartlarner.blogspot.com/p/stuff-you-can-access-now.html