I go down
the aisle
I never go down, in fact
I forgot all about
sweet
chilli sauce and other sauces
I rarely splash
out on, that
sickly sweet
taste: tongue stirring
a mouthful of oven chips, mayonnaise and sweet
chilli, winter evenings, laptop precarious
on a long-scrapped dining-
room chair, cables tripwired every spare
inch of our carpet, a charger
always on the verge
of breaking
for good
No
I don’t need that
I won’t be going down
this aisle
again.

Roy Duffield is the art editor over at Anti-Heroin Chic and a winner of the Robert Allen Micropoem Contest (2021). He somehow managed to con a first in creative writing out of Bath Spa University, and has even had the gall to return to the scene of the crime, this time in the skin of lecturer. He was honoured to be chosen to perform at the 2019 Beat Poetry Festival in Barcelona, alongside some of the contemporary Spanish performance poets he most admires, and his words have recently been spotted entering such nefarious establishments as The Journal of Wild Culture, Into the Void (Saboteur Best Magazine, 2017 & 2018), Osmosis, Harpy Hybrid Review and The London Reader.