Pyrexia
January air once had a sting, sweetand cold, like breathing ice cream.
Snow was an innocent trick played
on us as we slept, a fresh page.
In the orchards ghost apples hung,
hollow, ringing like glass.
Now the sea ice that used to take
the loping weight of bears is thinning
like a boiled sweet on the tongue,
seals plunge after their slick prey
from the shrinking salt-floes, icebergs
jostle, creak as they split and calve.
Winter’s become a poor thing, a muddy
parody, a slop underfoot, a cheat, snow
lies grit-soiled, trickles from gutters.
In the south, forests are ripped by lightning,
sour ash blows through city streets, shoals
of small things swim on the filthy tide.
Autumn Equinox
Branches hang limp,droop, green and gold
under the sun’s late pulse,
the sky low, engorged.
Tidewater lies slack,
traffic exhales particles
on its sour out-breath
and no rain falls.
Then a shudder,
a stir, and the heavy
air’s lightened, rinsed
of its dusty lassitude.
The high descant of drip
swells into a full chorus,
a blessed roar, the ground-bass
of this cleansing storm.
Imogen Forster lives and works in Edinburgh. She has an M in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University. Her pamphlet, The Grass Boat, was published by Mariscat Press in 2021. The title poem is included in Best Scottish Poems 2021, an online anthology of the Scottish Poetry Library. She is currently working towards a full collection, with the provisional title, Adverse Camber. Twitter: @ImogenForster2
Banner Art: From the Evidence of Trees, a visual poem by Robert Frede Kenter. Twitter: @frede_kenter, Instagram: r.f.k.vispocityshuffle.
IceFloe Press 