An echo of a dead season.
November slips into the world
like a blackened afterbirth.
Pumpkins sag into a grotesque
mimicry of age on doorsteps
and in damp gardens.
Wallowing, rotten yolks:
melting faces spit
seeds like knuckle bones.
Trees throw their arms open
to the wind, shivering at the root
with mushrooms and moss.
Time is an old house
with a creaking door.
Everything is edge.
And an antlered god walks
the woods with the stiff body
of the earth in their arms.
Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. Her work has appeared in The Coachella Review, Atrium, Okay Donkey, bath magg, and trampset. Her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry will be published by Black Cat Poetry Press in 2023.
photo by Sarah Murray (via wikimedia commons on a CC BY 2.0 license)
Crow & Cross Keys 