This week’s featured poet is author of the chapbooks Stovetop Ghosts (Femme Salve), Girl / Mirror / Wolf (Bullshit Lit), and one of my personal current favorites, Postcards from Ragnarok (Alien Bhudda). Please enjoy the following three poems by this fine poet, Katy Naylor! Thank you, Katy, for allowing me to feature your work.
Social Creature
You try to reason with medusa
carefully explain yourself
you should go
She just stares
each head hisses a different refutation
you keep your eyes down
but she must have got to you, somehow
that's why you can’t bring yourself to leave
your feet must be made of stone
carefully explain yourself
you should go
She just stares
each head hisses a different refutation
you keep your eyes down
but she must have got to you, somehow
that's why you can’t bring yourself to leave
your feet must be made of stone
Terminal
Grief and jet-lag have a lot in common. They're both a sort of time travel.
We were the first ones at the desk. It was still closed, roped off, our connecting flight not yet on the board. We waited, tagged and ready, heads swimming slightly at the new time zone, our bodies protesting that we belonged six hours ago. You read a book to me, played i-spy, while I sat on a suitcase, pop-socked feet dangling. The tired lines around your eyes told one story, our laughter, another.
You're gone now. And I'm unhitched, that little girl again. Groggy at the hours the rest of the world keeps, when I'm still somewhere else, though my body is here, sorting through your dresses. I'm lost in the terminal, watching for the connection. Other people's luggage rattles, echoing and I'm standing in front of those ropes, staring at the boards.
Each departure is your name and I'm too late to make the gate.
We were the first ones at the desk. It was still closed, roped off, our connecting flight not yet on the board. We waited, tagged and ready, heads swimming slightly at the new time zone, our bodies protesting that we belonged six hours ago. You read a book to me, played i-spy, while I sat on a suitcase, pop-socked feet dangling. The tired lines around your eyes told one story, our laughter, another.
You're gone now. And I'm unhitched, that little girl again. Groggy at the hours the rest of the world keeps, when I'm still somewhere else, though my body is here, sorting through your dresses. I'm lost in the terminal, watching for the connection. Other people's luggage rattles, echoing and I'm standing in front of those ropes, staring at the boards.
Each departure is your name and I'm too late to make the gate.
Fret
The mist is cold, cotton wool gentle.
It hangs in shining droplets from the dune grass and soaks soft into our skin
We sit with the rounded pebbles and the seagulls, ice-white and grey.
You clutch a shell tight in your palm.
This moment is meniscus thin.
A single word could burst it,
send it rolling salt down our cheeks.
The mist is low.
We watch the sea and sky resolve their differences,
and kiss.
It hangs in shining droplets from the dune grass and soaks soft into our skin
We sit with the rounded pebbles and the seagulls, ice-white and grey.
You clutch a shell tight in your palm.
This moment is meniscus thin.
A single word could burst it,
send it rolling salt down our cheeks.
The mist is low.
We watch the sea and sky resolve their differences,
and kiss.
Katy Naylor lives by the sea, in a little town on the south coast of England. She writes poetry, fiction, and games and has been published through venues including Black Bough Poetry, Ellipsis Zine and Emerge Literary Journal. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfictions and Best of the Net and is EIC of interactive arts mag voidspace zine. Find Katy across social media platforms @voidskrawl and @_voidspace_zine and online at: www.voidskrawl.uk