August 16th, 2025Local Lines
In the bar my mum used to work
the smoke never shows on a ceiling that colour. decades cling to lungs like smouldering to glass. & still, i hear the men talking as if they can rewrite the prize horse with a pint, the mean bet that turned their futures to shadows, to ash.
there in the alcove i once called my childhood, an eternity wept into the coaster or clear as a looking glass on the varnish, my eyes squint through the ventilator’s haze as someone wins the feature & an old woman cries, not once but many times.
my mother knew the right beer before a note hit the bar. the twitch of an eyebrow, a threat not a courtesy. certain names, she was told, kept the coppers at bay, so she learnt to say locals. she in turn was a mother of sorts. give ‘em pride. give ‘em place. listen. that’s all they wanted like anyone else. her father was a drunk, so perhaps she knew the trick for what it was. no one called this bleating. no one called this place pews.
me, no bigger than a hangnail, 12 ounces that head-butted the rim, i watched with astonishment as these men emptied themselves with the emptying of a glass. i wish i could say i didn’t admire them—but two decades later, i’m still searching for the men who talk as if all men are granted.
- Rebecca Lister
Why I chose this poem: I have written very few poems about my mother. I suspect this is due to the gendered nature of writing production: men write about men, and women about women. All this, despite the fact that my mother has always been my ‘light in the dark’. This is an ode to the labour she endured and the places she worked—places that I once called my childhood.
Join Rebecca Lister on Saturday, August 23 from 1.30pm at Daylesford Hotel for big beautiful female theory – play reading and Saturday, August 23 from 6.30pm at Hotel Bellinzona for Words in Winter Gala.
Local Lines features poetry by locals about local and any other matters.
Please submit poems to Bill Wootton at cottlesbreedge@gmail.com
