Sage

by Amy Ekins

There are licks of green about your face.
I see long grass threaded into your hair,
smudges of leaves against your lips,
and acorns threaded then hung from your ears.

I long to look these licks close up,
to touch them with my tongue and tell you how they taste –
like soil, and iron, and cold clarts, no doubt. Maybe a slip
of sage, just at the edge, from where we tumbled into the herb patch?

Unlikely. You bristle when I near you, oak become pine,
smoking like woodbine with tension at the mention
I may want to speak with you. You stopper your mouth
with twigs, and run, leaving mossy footprints in your wake.

Mother Africa

by Amy Ekins

I’m moving to a place of closely weaved harmonies
and wide vowels, where the sun is always yellow as the earth,
and the rhythms are beaten out on trees
and stones
and the heads of small children with large smiles.

I’m carrying myself there with the off-rhythm taps
I make beneath my desk with Toms.
I’m taking off my cardigan, and tying up my hair,
and picturing myself wrapped in fabrics with hand-pressed patterns.

I’m shifting one shoulder up and down as the radio dances,
kicking up dust behind me, and planning out the injections.
And then?

And then I’m pricked with a paperclip realisation that the dust is not
the radio come to life, but the cleaner behind me.

The sun is gone, and the space is grey anew.