share


Playing Dead

The tree has fallen

in the middle of the yard,

 

cracked to quarters

during last night’s storm

 

which played its elegy

then left in a rush.

 

The angry lover flips

land on its back,

 

leaves the earth a stripped

and stained mattress.

 

Rain has reduced a crab

nestled by broken bark

 

to a small shell

rotting in the midday heat.

 

Children gawp

at its glistening armour,

 

imagine its claws break

men like molluscs,

 

then piece its home together,

splint by splint.

 

A gardener finally

announces its condition

 

to stop them photographing

the battered form

 

anyone could have

mistaken to be sleeping


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

lives in London, where she has worked in TV, film and publishing. She graduated from Oxford's Creative Writing MSt in 2018 and has a poem forthcoming in Wasafiri.



READ NEXT

Art

November 2012

Pending performance: Cally Spooner’s live production

Isabella Maidment

Art

November 2012

It’s 1957 and the press release still isn’t written[1] An actress dressed in black overalls stands on a theatrically...

Interview

August 2017

Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh

Yen Pham

Interview

August 2017

Ottessa Moshfegh’s first two books are, as she tells me, very different from one another. But despite the contrast...

Essay

Issue No. 20

Notes on the history of a detention centre

Felix Bazalgette

Essay

Issue No. 20

Looking back at Harmondsworth as he left, after 52 days inside, Amir was struck by how isolated the detention...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required