Bourne by Chloe Stopa-Hunt

it comes from inside the compound

I will bring the tambourines

examine myself all over neat as a breviary

where appropriate it is a restriction that we place

upon everyone

you understand that it was like consumption

I cannot bear to be alone

I cannot bear to get hooked on some new lipstick

and then give it up

the matter of adornment brings affinity

the matter of fineness is formulaic

like my affinity for a starveling spring

for a hop out o’ kin

for the scales of anaemia played on fast and free like liberated

soldiers of the sea

it blossoms inside the compound where I am told

I can ratify certain things in the frost-bitten tradition

we have kept intact for ancient changelings

who flicker in and out of sacrificial places

a bourne I recognise at once

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Chloe Stopa-Hunt is an Eric Gregory Award winner and former Foyle Young Poet of the Year. Her first pamphlet, White Hills, was selected as the LRB Bookshop’s pamphlet of the year. She has been nominated for the Pushcart and Forward Prizes, and won the University of Oxford’s English Poem on a Sacred Subject Prize in 2010. As she lives with profound disability, her poetics centre on the queered femme body and on imagistic translation of experience.