Poems

Botany              Sarah Holland-Batt 

 After the rain, 

we went out in pairs 

to hunt the caps

 that budded at night: 

wet handfuls of waxtips and widows, 

lawyer’s wigs, a double-ringed yellow. 

 We shook them out onto gridded sheets, 

the girls more careful than the boys, 

pencilled notes on their size and shape, 

then levelled a wood-press over their heads. 

 Overnight, they dropped scatter patterns 

in dot-and-dash, 

spindles and asterisks 

that stained the page 

with smoky rings, 

blush and blot, 

coal-dust blooms. 

 In that slow black snow of spores 

I saw a woodcut 

winter cart and horse 

careen off course, 

the dull crash of iron and ash, 

wheels unravelling. 

 All day, a smell of loam hung overhead. 

We bent like clairvoyants 

at our desks trying to divine the message 

left in all those little deaths, 

the dark, childless stars.

Exhibit by Sadiqa De Meijer
 

Shattered          Ali Blythe

Your eyes look like
beach glass fresh
from a pounding. 

I wish I could float
you inside an empty
bottle and raise your 

many tiny sails.
But one has to accept
the tense of a feeling. 

You will never be
well enough again
to exist on anything 

but a diet of thin ice.
You will recurrently
have the sense someone 

is checking the time,
which you suspect
might be suspended 

from nurse-clean clouds
by a delicate gold chain.
You will have to drink

meds from a plastic
cup. Next, you won’t
remember a thing.