Bring lip salve, wear a life jacket by Kate Noakes

Here, use the words stand, terminal moraine,

glacial flour, blue, calving, face,

crash and echo.

You don’t want to use warming, melt water,

forty years, change,

or seven kilometer lake.

Six hundred year old ice from a floating berg,

its pure-air bubbles bursting

on your tongue is optional.

Dropping your phone to the cloudy depths

is a metaphor.

___________

Kate Noakes lives in Bristol, and has a PhD in contemporary British and American poetry

from the University of Reading. Her new book arising from this work is Sublime Lungs,

published by Two Rivers Press in 2026.