we coax it back.

We mourn.

We fight.

Jen Campbell

New Glass

We hold up the new gods of our post-electric reality.

Echo our dreams into empty rooms,

shelter the strange television flowers that try to seduce

us away from the memory of weather.

But outside there is new rain. Twenty-five sets of hands

to make you feel at home.

When you close your eyes, you hear the sound of wind

trapped behind the police station like a sacrifice.

You think back to all the homes you once sold yourself,

the eyes behind the hotel windows, facing out on a cold

Euston station.

How you live further than trying to sleep now.

The kingdom is in recess,

we have built love a blanket and put sticks in it like a tent,

we have let the land own it and protect the people who find it.

We tell their stories, choir the threads of it, make friends

with the birds who fly in and out of the Wi-Fi signals.

We sing new wonder at our collective hope, and make new

glass from it.

Greta Bellamacina

Release

With swift

Great sweep of her

Magnificent arm my pain

Clanged back the doors that shut my soul

From life.

Adelaide Crapsey

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.

Anne Sexton

The Lady with the Sewing-Machine

Across the fields as green as spinach,

Cropped as close as Time to Greenwich,

Stands a high house; if at all,

Spring comes like a Paisley shawl –

Patternings meticulous

And youthfully ridiculous.

In each room the yellow sun

Shakes like a canary, run

On run, roulade, and watery trill –

Yellow, meaningless, and shrill.

Face as white as any clock’s,

Cased in parsley-dark curled locks –

All day long you sit and sew,

Stitch life down for fear it grow,

Stitch life down for fear we guess

At the hidden ugliness.

Dusty voice that throbs with heat,

Hoping with your steel-thin beat

To put stitches in my mind,

Make it tidy, make it kind,

You shall not: I’ll keep it free

Though you turn earth, sky and sea

To a patchwork quilt to keep

Your mind snug and warm in sleep!

Edith Sitwell