Smitha Sehgal,

How Women Become Poems in Malabar

A Deer Could Paint Grass

A deer before headlights unwinds

a song in her head. Run says the forest. Faster

says the night. Caesura says the moon. Take us

along says the stars. Night cuts in, blue as frost.

Deer cannot smell grass now, draped in summer

singing in the leopard eyes

of a night truck.  Fix the frame of slow dawn

and nail it down. Or else, a deer could paint

grass. Tall stalks. Interspersed with sorrel.

A forest could wait. Long strokes of viridian.

Add a lake for that interesting bit.

Slip in a mandarin dragonet. Invite the leopard for a dip.

Warblers sing under the canopy

concealing the naked lies of moon, they hop over,

endlessly thrashing

scum of loyalty. Holding lanterns, lone

brides illuminate the night to receive

lovers. Unseeing sleep, a pearl’s eye.

Deer wears her burnt skin, becoming leopard.

In a strange forest she washes and wrings

her spell in a bucketful of sun. This

is a disguise. Linseed oil on her brushes,

she walks down the night road.

Slow. Boulders

guard the lake beyond landslides.

This time leopard knocks twice over.

Cautious. Empty forest.

Light floods inside the song of a deer carcass.

Further details

Leslie Tate, Ways To Be Equally Human

Impossible Rebellion

The phone rings. The policeman says my wife’s been taken

from her protest action unwell.

The brightness dips. The life I’ve been holding close

is a dark flower, or the imprint of a flower, heeled into tarmac.

A shadow passes. A sudden shortening.

The wait outside the hospital is a lifetime.

Our deaths make time go on.

Future rights. Tipping points. The clock ticking down.

I’m looking at that long slope that leads to below.

It’s why we’re here with drums and flags raising the alarm,

and our bare flesh glued to wood and metal.

Let them take us while our hearts are still beating.

Our bodies are for the dark, the place of no return.

We are extinction flowers scattered on the ground.

The Earth’s more fragile than we thought.

And now the wait is over. As the police lift bodies,

you emerge as Euridice, born again on a shell of light.

There is no turning back.

Further details

Angela Topping, Earwig Country

Earwig Country

The flowers are white cups, poised upright,

as if waiting to be filled. Bindweed stems

holds them up to the light, like fine porcelain.

I investigated them for scent. A flower like that

must be an olfactory delight, but deep within

dark brown clawed things crawled.

As children we believed earwigs aimed

to enter our heads through the portal

of our ears, bury themselves in our brains.

Beautiful things have inner horrors

I learned to be wary of. The hedges held aloft

whole tea services of bone china, pure white

full of the plotting of earwigs. Put your ear

too close and you will hear them, whispering

in their marble citadels. They are coming for us still.

Further details