The Strid
She tells him it comes from stryth, Old English
for turmoil, and while his fork scrapes marks
in congealing sauce, she fashions a makeshift
diorama with recycled napkins: here, she says,
a river turned sideways. Like a cut that carries
across the skin, bleeding, then slips under it:
more faint, but still there. A hairline bruise.
Later, in her bedroom, over wine, videos
of a camera on a wire, tossed into the depths.
Bubbles that deep should alarm you, she says.
The current just pushes, pushes shit down.
Before now, no human who has seen it
has survived. Every ten minutes, he scoops
with a finger small flies from her wine, offers
a fresh glass, but she wrinkles her nose, says
she’s fine. The next morning she throws him
off her, noticing that the crack in the plaster
of the ceiling is growing. Now imagine,
she says, that crack comes down. You and me,
say we’re newlyweds, say we’re walking.
We’re in love and the air feels different. Well.
_____________
Jake Reynolds is a poet from Lincolnshire. He currently lives and works in Norwich, where he is completing a PhD at the University of East Anglia on John Ashbery, populism, and the first-person plural in contemporary poetry. His poems have been published widely online and in print.
These poems were chosen by Anthropocene Guest Editor HLR.
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