My redhead skin smells the thunder and says thank you; tastes rain in the wind and smiles - opens its stretch marks like smiles not hand-me-downs from sad days, lets the water trickle like glitter or confetti - my redhead skin feels loved. Despite my burnished shoulders, lobster red rather than gold, I know this … Continue reading Redhead
Sometimes I choose titles before my pen reaches the paper; today, this poem, this story, this limb severed from my heart is half untitled because this is for me, for you and the one in the mirror we're so adamant isn't us. As if our reflections are portraits we have painstakingly sat for, only to … Continue reading A poem for –
after Emily Blewitt This is not a rescue. This one will sting like bees and pomegranate seeds; Persephone, oval eyes turned upwards to the darkness beading the sky. This is the beginning of the end, the fall into something new. This is you - tobacco and loose lips, my hips and buttercups. This is … Continue reading This Is Not a Rescue
after Kait Quinn My marbles, my mind, my temper when I was just five and the world kept turning in spite of my stubborn hands and feet trying to scale the stars. Breadcrumbs and balls of string; every attempt to find my way back home again; to savour the word again as it slips … Continue reading Things I have lost
They read a poem about a girl who is forced to leave a war-torn country, a home swarming with tanks and sunlight. The teacher asks them what they know about refugees; what it means to be displaced. They are shown a picture of a child washed up on the shore; the picture which made us … Continue reading Classroom study
after Emily Brontë & Emily Dickinson Hope makes herself comfortable in the dark. the moon has run away Even if she looked up, she would not see the sky but for the hairline crack in the lid of the jar. Her wings no longer flutter; they collect dust like swollen sapphires found glistening in … Continue reading Hope
My first harvest was bittersweet: the smell of wheat cut at the knees. Golden dust swirling in gusts, collecting in the sun-baked tractor tracks; waiting for an augur of untold fortunes to tell me which way is life. And so I watch again the propensity of my heart to fall, to fail, to start … Continue reading The second harvest
I pray in the small hours, in the quiet, instead of saying I love you. Words I will never say but still I thank those who bow their heads on my behalf; those who hold me tentatively between heaven and hell. I pray as if lying. As if keeping decade-long buried secrets. I say … Continue reading My Earth-bound years & God
The wind calls me its friend and I believe it. The trees look at me with their knotted eyes and I nod beneath their grand omniscience. I realise I cannot vanish. Gaia’s grip is nondescript, effervescent and ever-present. She will not let me go. She will not allow me to descend into titanic depths and … Continue reading She will not let me go
Butterfly season. The small lilac fluttering about the buddleia, the cabbage white weaving between laurel leaves, and the mahogany with spotted black irises for wings circling above the patio; circling above my cat’s olive eyes. His body curved in silent wait, claws curled for capture. Whilst their gossamer wings wilt in collapsible softness; death dust … Continue reading Ars Poetica (after Dana Levin)
