Crowstep
poetry journal
Bowl Barrow
I sit at the foot
of your tomb and watch
as fog descends
extends its cold fingertips across the crisp-moss hills
becomes a sudden sandstorm gathering speed and bite:
pursues a red kite, striking white under its wings.
Gorse shrubs
drop barbed spines
Carline thistles
shake dead heads
walkers are forced to battle
through fine fistfuls of vapour
emerging
with chalk manes restrained
travelling land they don’t
understand.
Their feet resist, create
rifts. Tug and trudge
disturb mud, stumble
over your grave; labelled
a bunker
a ditch
a crater.
I reach for my scarf, pull
it tight around my chest
feel the chill of damp grass
pull my l i m b s apart.
I am the bones beneath the barrow
left for none to see.
Pin and Thrum
Primrose leaves soft and green
creased like wrinkled skin, fine
hair coats your stems, lanugo
to each new born limb. Pin-eyed
blooms rub against thrum
as the pale brimstone gathers
crumbs of nectar and nearby
buckthorn shoots. Your sepals
begin to tremble as day bows
to dusk, afraid of the passing
light and what life will be like
when dusk becomes night. You
long for her wings to brush your
petals, but the brimstone flitters
and quivers in the hedge as she
lays her oval eggs out of sight.
Ninety-three Concentric Rings
Your crenate leaves are the colour of clay silt
left to harden in winter.
Fallen apples, once green and flushed, gather
in sunken splits at your base; rusted orbs
leaking sour juice: collection long overdue.
Withered branches droop like unhooked
curtains, catch my fine knit cardigan, tear
a ragged gap in the sleeve’s seam
unearth roughened skin. My fingernails scratch
scrape past dead layers until I feel the living
dermis beneath.
I fill my bare basket to the brim
with discarded branches, forgotten apples
and lined leaves.
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Lottie Angell is a Sussex based poet and creative writing/wellbeing workshop facilitator. She graduated with a first-class master’s in Creative Writing from The University of Brighton in 2018. Lottie is currently working on her chapbook The Isolation Hospital – an interaction with life through the lens of isolation.
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