When a new teacher took a different approach

to algebra it began to make sense.

Rain dribbled down the high windows,

their panes rattled in the wind.

 

At break, a compass point became a gouge

lifting splinters of wood from my desk lid.

The letters I’d carved were blonde against dark wood –

ILLYA KURYAKIN

 

Each week I’d watch his fringe dance across his forehead,

long for his responsive bottom lip

to reach mine, I’d marvel at the perfect

whorls of his ears.

 

His steady blue-eyed gaze and sliding Russian accent

would penetrate my bedroom.

Occasionally he’d help with Latin homework,

listening as I conjugated and declined –

bellum, belli, bello, bella, bellorum, bellis

 

More often I acted as his accomplice,

accompanying him on his adventures,

attentive to his every whim.

Come with me to the Casbah.

 

I’d climb with him through an oubliette,

risk my life in a shoot-out.

In detention, sanding the letters from my desk

took for ever, their outlines still visible

no matter how much wood stain I applied.

Chrissie Gittins writes poetry, poetry for children, short stories and radio drama. She has published three poetry pamphlets and three collections – Armature (Arc), I’ll Dress One Night As You (Salt) and Sharp Hills (Indigo Dreams). She appeared on BBC Countryfile with her fifth children’s poetry collection, Adder Bluebell, Lobster (Otter-Barry Books). She has received two Arts Council grants and an Author’s Foundation award; she features on the Poetry Archive and is a Hawthornden Fellow. Chrissie has read her poems on BBCR4, at the Royal Festival Hall, the StAnza, Aldeburgh, Ledbury and Shetland festivals, and at the British Council Bangkok and at the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York. Her recent poems are published in the anthologies Women On Nature (Unbound), Wonder (Natural History Museum/Macmillan), A Poet for Every Day of The Year (Macmillan), Empty Nest (Picador), and Night Feeds and Morning Songs (Trapeze), and in publications including Bad Lilies, Perverse, Magma and Poetry Salzburg Review. She has also published two short story collections and had four plays produced on BBCR4.