Issue 32: Hannah Linden

My skyscrapers leak

Under my bath a star-silence.

All the dirty water from slicken thought-fish

joins it. A pond of pheromones

& tessellated reflections. Enough to support

a whole eco-system. It’s only

a weighing of time till it spreads

into my self-clock. Old aprons re-electrify,

cleaned & then recycled 

to a home of psychosoma & breath-prints

that flower in gratitude

on our unlatched thunderstorms.

Future Melodrama

My blue-gold, under blankets

vowel-howling through winter

hungry, grubbing for many-letters

pirate awareness, cave-like

sloth, dearest, goodbye-hello

extricated wait-for-me

beheaded helix, spin-spin

collision of loudest

devastation irrevocable

singularity 001001

bankrupt

Counteract

Dew-damp, feet

unpracticed, soundless

in the grass-blade openings

bite of autumn

receptive decay

Hailing from a northern working-class background but living now in ramshackle social housing in Devon, Hannah Linden has had her poetry published in Acumen, Iamb, Lighthouse, Magma, New Welsh Review, Shearsman, Tears in the Fence, Under the Radar and elsewhere. Her most recent awards include 1st prize in the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition in 2021, and highly commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. Hannah’s debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press), was shortlisted for Best Poetry Pamphlet 2023 in the Saboteur Awards. She’s currently working towards her first full poetry collection. Twitter/X: @hannahl1n

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