Alex Mepham’s poem ‘The Blue Hour’ was highly commended in the Best Single Poem category of the 2025 Disabled Poets Prize.

The Disabled Poets Prize looks to find the best work created by UK-based deaf and disabled poets.

The Blue Hour

At the far end of the hall beyond the man 

eating a sandwich alone and the women 

sitting in silence, bowing into their screens 

is a man in a mustard-yellow hat curved over 

a birchwood piano. He is playing Satie. 

A woman stands pointing a camera towards 

him. The man does not look up. A gymnopédie 

echoes among marble columns, from cerulean, 

aquamarine, turquoise, jade and forest green tiles 

and the buBed and discoloured parquet floor. 

Cousin Hannah is working behind the bar 

fiddling with a spoon. We both say things 

are fine, until we agree: No, things are not all fine. 

It’s all fucking shit. Hannah is trying to figure out 

what she is doing. She says: I just want to escape. 

It is now four, and the damp grey light bleeds 

through the bevelled windows. A ferris wheel 

creaks outside, glinting at us pure white lights, chains 

of plastic pearls. Hannah says: My life is a ripe peach 

I must keep rotating, and I’ve been on my side too long. 

The man at the piano is now playing Debussy, until 

he stops, and the woman filming him stops. He walks 

to the bar, fastens his apron, and prepares an order: 

two lattes, two teacakes. Hannah takes out the trash 

declaring: This is my favourite time of day.

About Alex Mepham

Alex Mepham is a writer and translator based in York, UK. Alex has received a Northern Writers Award, and has work appearing in Magma, PN Review, The Stinging Fly, Prototype, and Modern Poetry in Translation, among others.