All the little insects love my yellow coat –
I mean the tiny frail ones, that you can’t 

take between finger and thumb and relocate
somewhere safer and more nourishing,

but have to flick them gently with your nail, 
to the hard ground where they’ll be trodden on.

What are they looking for? Perhaps for pollen
or sunshine, or a mate. Spring is late.

And this was my life too, from fourteen, 
flinging myself at any boy who seemed

golden, promising sunlit hours. Sitting at 
some fellow student’s feet in the afternoon

drinking tea. hoping for a touch. Which came,
sometimes, but I always knew I would soon

be flicked away like a tiny insect. And thirty years
married, I still do it. Will I ever fly straight?

Veronica Zundel is a non-fiction writer and graduate of the Poetry School/Newcastle MA in Writing Poetry. Her poems have been published in Magma, Snakeskin, The Ekphrastic Review, The Alchemy Spoon and various anthologies, used in an OU foundation course and broadcast on Radio 2 and 4. She has won the Barnet Open and Cruse Lines competitions, been a finalist in the Mslexia competition and won second prize in the Sonnet or Not competition and joint second in the Hippocrates Open. She has been a judge in the biennial Jack Clemo competition.