Katherine Coda, Safety Measures Against the Sea

Safety Measures Against the Sea

When the notes – or their echoes – crash through you

all you have is try to hold tight again again: this place /

not there / not him / not then / this time. Clutch jumper

to ribs wrists throat oh fold yourself with not enough hands

to keep all of his away. Be littler littlest, just keep still. Toe heel

to floor only as solid as anything else in these seas. You’d leave

if you could but the doors are far away across a vast and polished,

unmapped space and edges blur and you – or the room – sway.

This shifting, ringing dark leaches in while outside lights burn,

spit like words across need for just this quiet, dark, stilling.

Hold on, heart a lifeboat lurching outside, minds hard ropes

which split and creak, splinter once-smooth paint, bright, peeling.

This twist and hurt, this creeping cold, these old, old waves.

Further details

Jonaki Ray, Firefly Memories

Elegy to Newton’s Third Law

At eight, insomnia was a word

too weighty for the tongue that tasted

its shadow. I watched mother cook

the dishes father liked most.

I watched the dishes splatter the walls.

The turmeric staining golden, the chili

red, the coriander green, and mother

trembling like the jello she set.

I watched father vanishing from home.

On TV, villains waged a cold war

where the enemy was known

and always defeated,

but sleep, sleep never arrived.

Mother covered both of us

with the hand-crocheted

stole still smelling of granny’s sandalwood.

As the cicadas chirruped the winds of the plains

—destroyers of the sanity of people—

she and I gazed at the neighbours’ lights-turned-to stars

through the stole-holes and she weaved tales

of chilled air and coppered curves,

of foreign lands-turned-into sanctuary.

Further details

Hannah Stone, The Invisible Worm

Inventing New Gods

(‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;

They kill us for their sport’

King Lear, Act 4, Sc 1.)

There does not need to be pain,

they promise, tapping the syringe-driver,

indicating the ‘gold-line’ telephone number.

So, can we call on Midas

in those liminal hours? He could insinuate

himself into the room whose sofa

made way for hospital bed,

the room where we take turns to watch with you,

our un-drugged sleep peopled with plot-less dreams.

Beneath the window, a bodkin is stalled

in an unfinished tapestry –

half a rose, a green stem, the spine

of a leaf – dozing, you remember Beth

laying the needle which had become

‘too heavy’; the mice in Gloucester shouting

‘no more twist!’ You jerk awake,

and realise it was not Thanatos

but Atropos hammering at the door,

and there, on the threshold,

blocking the first glimmer of dawn,

stands the palliative care nurse,

holding aloft the frayed ends

of your amputated life.

Further Details