Featured Poet - Sophie Cooney

THE PIT

I have to make my meals

around the soil pit that’s grown

in my kitchen.

We can dance around it

but it doesn’t stop the earth from

singing to me.

The kettle is boiling

and somewhere outside a bird sings;

the pit inhales.

I eat dinner with it,

the scrape of a knife on the plate

whistling through me.

I starve myself with it

as it devours all the floor

around my feet.

Soon it will eat me, too,

and I’ll be too hungry to fight

as the ground caves.  

For now we co-exist,

humming in the light of the fridge,

breaking my bread.



JULY

I am drawing the curtains on July

and praying that August will be kinder.

I will stain my fingers with fresh berries

and pirouette back into my childhood,

when the sun warmed the wooden floor

and my heart was still safe within my ribs.

I will tie myself back together

with a daisy chain.

KINTSUGI

The crackle of plastic coating through

plastic coating,

yellow as an ox eye daisy,

placed on a flesh pink boat and

washed downstream.

I take the yellow inside,

filling the synapse gaps between

this and that, then and there.

Kintsugi.

They hold hands like paper dolls.

I want to eat more of the yellow.

To scoop up a bouquet and paint

all of my insides like the sun.

I want to be full of yellow like a daisy face.

I want to burst with it.

THE BLACK DOG

The summer is open and I have torn through my own leg like a cornered dog

and now the exposed nerve of me

blisters and twinges in the wind.

I am brutally, honestly alive

and with each second

comes mania, and ecstasy,  

and a deep and trembling fear

that no matter what I wrap myself in-

what gauze, what tender silk,

no matter the gentle touches

or the sunset or the birds,

I will always be mauled.

I will always be my own steel trap

dragging my metal behind me

with a muzzle coated in blood.

No one could ever bite me as hard as I could

sharpen my teeth against the flint of my own soul. No one can wound me like I can.

I would never let them.



CROW

The bird is perched on my shoulder.

Its crow is in the gulps of painful air I pull in

through my skin like a pierced worm on a barb.

It’s on my laundry line between my socks.

It leaves feathers in the sink,

mingling with my blood and toothpaste.

In the shower, it sings till I am dizzy.

I tried to set it free, once.

I wrote down how to open the window;

how to crack the latch like a snail shell.  

I can’t imagine how empty my shoulder would feel without it.

I can’t imagine how light.



MAGIC TRICKS

I have held my breath on happiness

I have stuffed the remains into my mouth

like a buzzard

I have made myself sick and dizzy with it

until intestines inevitably loop out of me

like magicians scarves, silken and tumbling

until I apologise for the mess I have made

and I regurgitate the carrion,

bones picked clean

then I’ll scrabble in the raw emptiness of it,

create a bloated finger painting out of the viscera,

try to claw back with my hands how it felt

to be full

~