Monday

The tide creaked to a halt on Tuesday. Fishermen’s boats
sailed to its end and watched the drop (twenty metres).
Wednesday, children walked to the wall: threw ropes,
pitched their hands like hooks to rouse the weevers.
Men lay ladders against the salty-hedge and dived.

Saturday, the sea turned brown, shutters clattered
closed to keep the stink out. Dead fish burst the surface,
seagulls flew so far in they forgot to return. Weeds clambered
up, tentacles piercing the plane, midgets drew laced
patterns in the sky. We waited for the tide to start again.

Broken stones, boned sand, and wrinkled mud hurried
their layering. The sea solidified as outside, the rocks rolled
in. Boulders, smoothed from the trip but pierced by a hole,
so that they seemed like an army of eyeballs, boldly
gathered by the wall of sea that had turned rusty

–

A handsome new poem by Warwick PhD student, Claire Trevien.

Claire’s debut pamphlet, Low-Tide Lottery, is published by Salt, and she has an excellent chapbook, Patterns of Decay, available to view online from Silk Worms Ink.