As I enrol, I write: I hope this experience will be
a cocoon, but it’s some odd silk,
the judge/jury humidity of workshop,
the pub socials we weather for the free drinks,
how we can barely look at each other.
Find me, marred with ink and mascara,
in Scholars’ Bar. Find Clover and me, pissed.
Find Clover and me watching dusk as it’s flung
back at us by the campus’s mirrored surfaces,
like a notorious poetry couple. At night
I do the laundry, and read as if
diligently fucking to conceive. I’m scared
of sending my work out now, just as I’m scared
of the brusque clunk when windows shut;
of the statue planted on the edge
of the library’s roof, its exposed cock.
I’m learning the iambs of messages arriving,
the strident meter – is it a thunder? –
of being near her, how I’ll always risk cliché
on this, as Primrose from workshop would tell me,
smirking, flicking her ombré hair over her delicate
shoulder. No human desire has been left
unwritten. Neither has any storm. If
a tree falls in a forest, et cetera, et cetera.
My first visit home, I’m still somewhat intact,
yet Mummy says no phones at the table;
she says, I’m worried – you’ll need
to make a living after all this;
I’m not convinced you’re even writing,
it seems you’ve done nothing
but moon over this Clover for months.
Mummy says, the rain out there
is torrential. She says, this is not a drill.
I tell her how poems are born
when the poet unseals the sky,
or thinks they have; how,
in this eye of my life, I’ve fallen
beside Clover, like a line in a sonnet
emerging as sheer as lightning,
and as aware of its destination.
__________
Olivia Tuck was runner-up in the 2023 Jane Martin Poetry Prize awarded by Girton College
Cambridge, and a 2022 Women Poets’ Prize longlistee. She is an associate editor at Tears in the Fence and at Lighthouse. Her pamphlet Things Only Borderlines Know is published by Black Rabbit Press.
This poem was chosen by Anthropocene Guest Editor HLR.
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