I hope you’re dead by Chantale Davies

If you’re a bird now I hope you’re extinct, 

and if you’re a song I hope it’s the song of cymbals 

traipsing down a staircase into oncoming traffic. 

If it’s you calling, I hope your phone drops down a drain 

and you lose everyone’s number and not just mine. 

If memories were bricks I’d throw all of ours at your house:

summer evenings where you got drunk and thought you

were someone whose name was already in a textbook,

and smoked your dreams into the air. I’d toss them 

into the shimmer of sea to become whale feed

and let the whales develop your ego. You’re the knife to my lung 

each time I see a shade of green I think you’d have liked or 

when something happens and I want to tell you about it like 

when I heard the pubgoers talk about the old films 

you didn’t understand and I think I understand them now, 

all the mirrors and light and heroines disappearing into corridors 

and how the monster comes back at the end to haunt them.

I hope you’re alive somewhere and less insane than you were.

And if you’re alive then I hope you’re dead to me.

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Chantale Davies is a poet from South Wales. Her work has appeared in The London Magazine, Friend: Poems by Young People, Zindabad Zine, and more. She won third place in The London Magazine’s Poetry Prize (2024), and was longlisted in the erbacce poetry prize (2025) and National Poetry Competition (2023).