Miranda Peake
She says she’s done it all before, she’ll wait for us
on the bench under the chestnut tree. Inside, we’re off at a run
wheeling round the corners, Miles in the lead, confident
knowing we must make mistakes to get it right. Amity is next
and I follow, breathing in her panic as we rush wordlessly on
the scratchy hedge corners grabbing at our jumpers, deafened
by the shouts of separated families. A doubt climbing all summer
is suddenly shoulder height. We reach the centre and I take
my coat off, read the plaque about how William III commissioned this
for Mary II, how Jerome K. Jerome got lost for hours
and had to be rescued. I think about my mother married
down the road in her plain silk dress, the French tourists clapping
and cheering. This maze is multicursal, this maze is old,
this maze was created for a wife.
Miranda Peake‘s poems have been published in magazines including Ambit, Banshee, Bare Fiction, Oxford Poetry, Magma, The Moth, Under the Radar and The Rialto. In 2014 she won the Mslexia Poetry Competition. Her pamphlet, Yellow, was published in 2019 with Live Canon. She is the owner of independent bookshop Chener Books in South East London.
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