urination
by Andrew McMillan
I’m scared of bumping someone while they piss
those Mondays I’m a packhorse bags hung
swinging around the urinal bodies
and one day I know I’ll knock someone
and they’ll piss their legs or they’ll turn slightly
and show another man their full arc
or they’ll fall into their own wet puddle
cock limp and neither of us will look
or he’ll look at me avoiding looking
feigning interest in the hard cream tiles
maybe it’s that I dream of being bumped
knocked from my aim by a stranger
the briefest touch during the private act
the toilet is an intimacy
only shared with parents when you are young
and once again when they are older
and with lovers when say on a Sunday
morning stretching into the bathroom
you wake to the sound of stream into bowl
and go to hug the naked body
stood with its back to you and kiss the neck
and taste the whole of the night on there
and smell the morning’s pale yellow loss
and take the whole of him in your hand
and feel the water moving through him
and knowing that this is love the prone flesh
what we expel from the body and what we let inside
From physical. Reproduced with kind permission from Random House Group.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2015
physical
Andrew McMillan
About Andrew McMillan
Andrew McMillan (b. 1988, Barnsley) grew up in a house with lots of poetry books and acknowledges Thom Gunn as a major influence: ‘the first poet I read who I thought represented something of my own experience’. He describes his debut collection physical (Cape Poetry) as ‘a collection about the male gaze on the male body’. He began it 2008, after breaking up with his first long-term boyfriend: as the collection developed, he found himself creating ‘physical, tight, muscular poems which would look un-emotionally at things which had happened, and attempt to come to some sort of redemption from them’.
He has published three pamphlets with Red Squirrel Press, every salt advance (2009), the moon is a supporting player (2011) and protest of the physical (2013) and his poems have featured in 2011’s Salt Book of Younger Poets as well as in Best British Poetry 2013 (Salt). He was named a ‘new voice’ in 2012 by both Latitude Festival and Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.
Andrew is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University and a writer in residence at the charity First Story.
