Tag Archives: Leah Atherton

And it isn’t like she imagined 
it would go this time.

There are no sirens. No smoke 
or shocked bystanders gawping over 
a taped-off crime scene.

She digs clawed fingers into the soft belly 
of the woods and counts her breaths.

One.
This is real. 
This is wet loam and old leaves. 
Beneath cracked palms, ten million connections 
spark to life and transmit a distress signal. 

[At the main street crossroads, the signal lights change to amber and stay there.]

Two 
is a snarl ripped 
from soft throat through the pit of 
her stomach and sends small birds scattering. 

[The old dog in the pub starts whining at the empty threshold until the publican curses and shuts the door.]

Three. 
Her fingers are rooted, tangled 
in the mesh beneath the mossy skin 
of forest. Green veins twist her shirtsleeves, 
creep thorns across clearing and root bole. 

[The chairman of the allotment society watches his prize marrow ripple and spoil.]

Four. 
A mile away a diminutive elm 
pokes its branches out of the hedge it has buried in 
for refuge and remembers sentinel hills 
and hangings. 

[There is a baby crying in the police station. Nobody can find it.]

Five. 
The forest responds. 
Mycelium neurons return
answers from a yew behind the village church, 
nine hundred years wise and still guarding the gate. 

[The vicar is pouring communion wine down the toilet. The wafers fur in their sealed packets.]

Six. 
The hub trees echo and she bends 
with the saplings and weeps. 
The forest takes her gift of salt. 
Her blood thickens and becomes toxic. 

[A wife trips on a name and drops the serving dish, watches Sunday lunch splatter gravy across the linoleum floor.]

Exhale. 
She withdraws her fingers, retracts 
the taproots from her soles. 
Admires the ripple of thick bark beneath the skin. 

One. This is real.

Never again, the trees shudder. Never again.

photo by Gabriela Cheloni (via pexels)

If I told you I remembered the first time we met I would be lying. 

I would tell you I walked into the forest to find the hangman’s tree and 
buried a box of cat bones and grave dirt at the roots, 
that he emerged from the trees antler-crowned and coffee sweet. 

We sinners are all alike in the end, 
and there is a deeper magic to the predawn quiet between 
the students stumbling home and the morning joggers coming out.

The thing about the old gods is that they never make 
promises they can’t keep. 
I have made myself into a promise. 

Last spring he found me by the canal. 
We sat shoulder to shoulder and watched the sun come up 
and turn the railway cranes into crucifixes. He said nothing, 

only emerged from the shadows 
of the old railway yard like the edge of sleep, 
lit a cigarette and watched the clouds play with the rising steam.

Once, I left him a coin at the crossroads and woke 
the next morning blanketed in wisteria and thorns. 

I have stopped asking how he followed me to the city I call home now. 
Even the old gods get lonely on occasion.

These days I could find him anywhere without looking. 
He finds me in airports and graveyards, 
the kind of gentle people once drowned their daughters for.

I leave small things for him in places 
I know the light won’t reach. Tealeaves and miniatures of rum. 
Seashells and fossilized ammonites.

Once, he was in a dive bar pool room in a nowhere town 
where I had run to escape the noise; all cock-sure swagger, 
cold lager and cheap cologne. He put a coin in the jukebox and we danced 

until I could hear the baying of hounds in the bass 
and names blurred to black lacework up his arms.

In exchange for my peace, the poems are everywhere. 
They crowd the lids of pens and spill out of coffee cups. 
I asked for the chaos that would fill empty pages and he kept me.

There have been times I questioned the wisdom of my wish 
and tried to sink myself in the still waters of a calm kind of love. 
I tore up the notebooks and clamped my lips shut. 

In the end we always find our way back to air. 
He never made me ask twice.

I know what it is to carry unuttered 
yearning in the whisky-laced night. 

So tell me your name, dreamer.

Tell me the promises you made 
to yourself and what you’d bargain 
away

Don’t be shy; 
the sun will come up too soon.

photo by Oscar Keys (via unsplash)