like spilled apple pies.
I question your slick grace
with sabre-edged glances—
I know your fantasies,
the way you let them loose
when the moon darkens in January.
I vivisect you, leave you butchered
and clean.
In the long nights, I sing pain,
composing celestial laments
but gravity keeps me.
Lauren Harwyn
When Bride Came
When Bride came, her ship aglow with burning atmosphere,
the crouching, cowering Celts believed she was a god.
When Bride came, an unauthorized traveler,
she placed her protective cloaking device out over the emerald hills.
When Bride came, gold-tongued ambassador of the stars,
poets wove her tripod communicator out of purple reeds.
When Bride came, with her M-class medi-kit,
she had enough vaccines to cure the frail, the sick, the blind.
When Bride came, master engineer, she fixed the broken replicator
and everyone ate cheese.
When Bride came and scanned the geosphere,
her laser drills left deep-cut wells which filled with fresh spring water.
When Bride came, she set a homing beam alight,
so as she wept to leave the earth, she might return again someday.
Lauren Harwyn
Pulses
We hoped for surfeit, epic globes, a bounty
so ribbed and basketballed,
uprooting it would launch us backwards,
making soil-angels in the rich pudding earth,
clutching the yield to our chests like kids
we had saved from drowning. We trusted
our harvest would be whimsical; carrots
bearded like Border Terriers, veg so fertile
it frowned like a facial composite. To claim
we got the opposite would not be the full story
but we were gloomy then, ambitions of first prize
fete rosettes crumbling as the spade clanged
out another return of dull chaffs
like dried bugs from a family heirloom. For once
we had enjoyed a common goal, a shared hobby.
Had planned, laboured, feeding
our allotted ground with mounds of kelp,
pounded egg shell, dark tea bogged down to molasses.
We stared mournfully at the disturbed plot,
assessing the drab lot at our feet, the conception
that what we had reaped was not what we’d sowed.
