I’ve updated this page so that it includes updates as well as poems. As you may know, my debut novel, The Unravelling of Flora Cotton, came out this week, published by Lyria Books. I had a great time at the Steampunk Bazaar in King’s Lynn meeting lots of lovely readers and talking about books. What a brilliant day! It’s also available on Amazon. Thanks to everyone who has supported me along the way.
I see you on the platform, half in shade,
a cigarette before your words could land,
bruise-blue smoke, an envelope you made
to seal your half-formed dreams inside your hand.
Then there you are again, the leaning wall,
your legs apart, its veins of cracked decay,
still gloating at your clever games, and all
the monstrous truths Jerusalem would say.
Your face, a silver veil, conceals the sparks,
those night bus elegies that twist away;
and every time you vanish into dark,
I die again, as if it were today.
Today I passed
that café,
the one with
the big red umbrellas,
where I used to sit
saying all the
right things
but thinking
of you,
the many
old hours
with and
without you,
falling
scattering
shifting
like ash
on a breeze,
not a memory
or a thought:
more of a shiver,
the way a door closes
and you realize
it was never
truly
open.
Wildfire Words, Anthology 6, 2024
The rosy-grey half light
of four a.m. martyrdom
clings to the now-sleeping garden,
where I feel the moon’s tethers
begin to unravel
and wish myself better
in ways I can’t fathom.
A few weary sunflowers stand
as my silent companions,
ochre crepe, the discarded wrapping
of summer’s long vanishing gifts,
downturned faces that wait
with a singular goal
of greeting the oncoming dawn.
Something precious survives
in their instinct to motion;
I share in an exhilarating sadness,
understanding that wonder
comes only with action,
with living,
outside of which there is nothing.
Our little car wanders a patchwork of trees
set deep at the mountain’s feet,
past a cottage where the river turns to a drop
and an old lady forms in a light dappled window.
Do you see her? There where the old gods
veil and caress the livid rock
over the outcrop, great globs of grey lichen
turned seafoam in the heady sun.
She was once a great beauty
(they always were, always!)
now flaked as the frittering paintwork
that hides from us a ghost of things to come
so we can keep girlhood for now,
its short shorts worn with silvery boots
flowing fast as my light scarf catching the air
in an artless wave of apparent eternity.
I was thinking about the uninvited
misremembered
and that day you said something
about painting words
in a garden
and I see the dark trail
of your heavy lids
like the shadow below
a raised thumb
the velveteen bristle
of wincing fingertips
gathered at the wrist
gathering
gathering
you gathered me and time caught up
The space between sand and sea
is a holding place,
thoughts like distant gulls
drifting,
words the threat of rain
dappling muted pebbles.
Please say nothing.
Let us find closeness
in the quiet line of cloud
and wide horizon,
our story told in the wind,
the burgeoning waves.
No animal besides a human
uses symbolic communication,
and here green paint marks
the place of TREE.
Like a problem
in a geometry exam,
I’m tongue-tied
to explain the irony.
I sensed that trees
could perceive how close
their neighbours were.
Yet here our kinship is lost,
a conversion of units
where once was a tree.
Created and found during Kin’d & Kin’d Wording the Edgelands workshop at Groundwork Gallery, using Tree (photograph) by Nicky Hurst https://www.groundworkgallery.com/events/wording-the-edgelands/; Philip Ball, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/11/animal-magic-why-intelligence-isnt-just-for-humans; Suzanne Simmard, Finding the Mother Tree, Allen Lane, 2021
A frigid off-white,
sufficiently thick
to pick at the edge
but dull enough to repeat and repeat
in a vanishing reel;
the kick inside
an empty womb.
In hollow praise to love
she watches the sleepwalkers
fetter their pearls
into arrogant shapes,
her menacing eye wept free
of kohl enough to paint
a trinket bride.
Follow their gaze
as they marvel at turbines
that move the horizon
in long pirouettes,
the spindle legs of impossible gods
dressed in the commonplace shades
of Dali’s wretched elephants.
Tracee Findlater 