This is a sweetness I forget I am allowed. Blue smoke shivering in the late May evening sun, and you, a silhouette against the trees and fields. Dusk’s dying heat playing upon the music of your lips, a mouth open to taste my summertime skin: fears melting into my pores, shimmering gold … Continue reading Cherry
I followed as the trees grew their leaves and leaned, green, into summer; I greeted the magpies who appear each day past the heat of noon; and I smiled as bluetits bobbed like feathery bubbles from bough to bough. Poem & photograph: © Kristiana Reed 2020 Between the Trees UK Between … Continue reading Silver linings in quarantine
then I hope the butterflies are just as beautiful / and the seas just as tempestuous / because I am learning to love / my squishiness and storms / and I want every version of me / happy / sullen / and wicked / to find stony strength in such fragility / I want every … Continue reading If there are infinite parallel universes (after Michelle Awad)
For days I have allowed the scene of a crime to exist heavy in my mind. An act of vandalism. The origami roses have all been torn to pieces and the ink stains angry red. Think of me I should have said - should have armed myself with flowers and love not listened to blue … Continue reading My bruises will sprout kindness
My piece on Free Verse Revolution this month. ❤
I grimace at the ripples
as my neighbours hoist
up the British flag.
The Union Jack underneath which
I shudder. I shudder
at the power, the dying,
the miscommunication,
the missing education,
and I shiver in the cold red
white and blue. Blue
sadness, blue lips,
blue blood and Blake’s words
about more blood
running down palace walls.
Whilst Jack shimmers in the wind,
in the sun, as if it is nothing,
as if it were fabric forgetful
of its deadly weight in gold.
Kristiana Reed is a writer and an English Teacher living in the UK. She is the creator of My Screaming Twenties and sole editor of Free Verse Revolution on WordPress. She released her debut poetry collection, Between the Trees, in Spring 2019. Her work has been published in several poetry anthologies (Swear To Me, All The Lonely People, We Will Not Be Silenced), in the feminist…
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Water spills from my edges - rose petal skin unfolding like french kisses and sweetness. I am a tree whittled to pale, raw bark glimmering in moonlight as she tells me every secret of every star, and ink blooms - foliage words curling themselves wistfully around every inch of me. I write … Continue reading Twenty-six
blossom - alive and wilted / bonfire smoke and cake / fresh air lingering on clothes / finding limpet fossils aged six / learning about everything which came before you / stones made of glass / pinwheels stuck stoically in English sand / rain storms and rainbows / the city of Rome and how I re-taught … Continue reading Things that don’t suck (after Andrea Gibson)
I touch my pulse to remind myself I am sane: blood is throbbing beneath my skin in every blue lilac vein. My hands tremble, the pillow and sheet echo every sound, every flutter of panic coursing - swift acting poison - through my limbs. And I know this is chemical, I know the … Continue reading Tiny deaths
I remember when you wished you had not spoken - three words which wrapped themselves like smoke around our ribs and settled, thickly, as ash on our lips. Three words that feel like glitter or dust yet taste sticky and sweet or bitter when consumed in a different light. And I felt like … Continue reading Unspoken
There is something soothing yet macabre in watching you weed: pull up life from the ground only to discard it atop the compost. Perhaps it is the control you exert, life and death growing weary in your palms - perhaps it is the reminder of how indelicate human nature is, how brutally we shake … Continue reading Weeds in the patio cracks
