Poem: Our Love Could Spoil Dinner by Emily Berry

Emily Berry is a veteran LRB contributor (you may know her as Poppy Tartt) and one of the main co-writers of The Breakfast Bible. She is also an Eric Gregory award-winning poet whose work was described by The Guardian as "a host of surreally imagined everyday scenes in which speakers and characters, by turns emotionally, intellectually and physically compromised, perform accepted, expected and imagined roles". Like all good literature, it sometimes mentions breakfast.

We are pleased to share this, the opening poem from her recently-published first collection Dear Boy.

Our Love Could Spoil Dinner

We always breakfast with the biographer.

On day one I showed him my grapefruit spoon;

it has a serrated edge. My father gave him

a Mont Blanc fountain pen as a welcome gift,

but I think he was more impressed by the spoon.

‘It’s almost like a knife!’ he said. The biographer

is a coffee nut and I use this fact to bond with him.

‘Oh, Robusta,’ I say dramatically when I know

he’s listening. ‘You inferior bean.’ When we pass

in the hall I fling my arm back and say things like:

‘Am I strung out or what!’ and ‘Time for another

caffeine fix, methinks!’ I am not allowed coffee

because of my nerves, but the biographer doesn’t

know this. Sometimes we sit up in bed comparing

moans. Mine are always loudest. The biographer’s

are hampered by his boarding-school education

and the British flair for embarrassment. Sometimes

the publishers call. When he gets on the phone,

he sweats; afterwards the right side of his face is damp.

I like to monitor these subtle changes. Last night

my father found us touching legs. ‘Go to your room!’

he shouted. ‘You shabby daughter.’ ‘You worthless

excuse for a story,’ the biographer added. They played

cards to settle a debt. That day my mouth felt wetter

than usual. I asked the biographer to check. He used

his tongue. ‘This may affect the results,’ he said.

Dear Boy is published by Faber. Buy it here.