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

feature

October 2014

Blood Out of a Zombie

Laurence A. Rickels

feature

October 2014

The German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger has on three different occasions put the camera aside and directed for the theatre, each...

feature

August 2013

The Ghosts of Place

Dylan Trigg

feature

August 2013

 ‘So I turned around for an instant to look at what my field of vision onto the sea had...

fiction

January 2014

Leg over Leg

Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq

TR. Humphrey Davies

fiction

January 2014

First published in 1855, Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of ‘the Fāriyāq,’ alter ego of...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required