In April 2006, Banksy created a sculpture based on a crumpled red phone box with a pickaxe in its side, apparently bleeding, and placed it in a side street in Soho, London. It was later removed by Westminster Council. 

A big thank you to Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, the poetry editor at London Grip for including my poem Red Telephone Boxes in the recent publication. 

Libby’s birth mother manifests in glass and steel,
In red boxes standing sentinel by roadsides,
Where memory bleeds into countryside.
These vessels wait for voices never coming,
Their hollow chambers echo with absence.
Inside, phones ripped from their metal wombs,
Umbilical cords severed, connections lost—

Yet still they stand, vermilion monuments
To all that has been taken, all that remains.

They rise when least expected—
when Libby smiles at something new....