Hannah Cooper-Smithson

Slick bubble of stone

suspended in a twist

of silver wire; pale green

(like hellebore flowers,

like sea-glass)

it holds pockets of time

within itself –

the sand melting crumbs of stone quartz
calcite feldspar becoming slack and liquid
frothing into irregularities of green glass
like spilled beads like water spasming
in a hot pan coming together in a sudden                     SHRIEKING
brightness

like flies

bumping the panes

of amber windows –

the tarmac melting the epithelium the fat
the bones shadows on the walls the smell
of the eyes melting the hands melting the
sky a sudden bright

SILENCE

that leak into the water,

into your children’s teeth,

their soft, forming bones.

Hannah Cooper-Smithson is a Midlands3Cities Arts and Humanities Research Council funded PhD student at Nottingham Trent University, England. Her poetry makes use of unconventional form to interrogate human relationships with the natural world and human identity in the Anthropocene.