Issue 16: NAME
Blue #1
This inland evening I am so far somewhere else,
scattering my own ashes to the shells and loving
the far and fainting sea, the shade of razor
blue it cuts the sky with, marking the mutation
of water into new air. My area of special interest is
blue. I seek the washedout cutout stars and next
morning wash up decked in fishbones, seaweed and
aquamarine. A maritime chandelier, wet with crystal.
After the first baptism comes conversion into vital
translucency. I swear off food and skyscrapers, resolving
to resolve myself only into water. I dream of living
as a mackerel, the iron stripes, the scales that glitter
on the hand like ash – and when I try to scrub them off
the skin comes too and blood beneath is cool and violent
blue. It turns to glass and salt, fish oil & streaming water.
The body is aqueduct. Soon I am only myself lying
on a pebble beach finding new blues in the many grey.
This time the bruises are silver. When the mind comes
it is quick and panics going back into the dark somewhere
leaving the body to re/form of its own blue accord.
I have the date somewhere, in lemon juice. Crying cuts the eyes.
When I find the sea one clear sometime early in the morning
I’ll walk out to the ice patches and see the old moon
like a blanched pea and my feet turn to lobsters and myself
to every single possible shell of sacred blue.
Blue #2
I am gazing vaguely into the distance without thinking
of anything in particular. This is a sea-view. White noise.
The blurnotblur of the horizon on a good blue day.
I am sure all these boats have noone in them. Burial at sea.
How practical I would be made. Into pillows barnacles and
rust, the first anchor. The slow end of time. Speaking of
white. The sun a fresh convenience. I cannot escape the sea,
being properly an island, against the will of god, being
a woman. It is a way of calling time, encrusting things
and all my parts made another in a bluer, wider whole,
and keeping time, of course, in waves. I would make jealous
the occasional ashes like dead fish scales with my new
green colour and blood still miscible with the saltandiron sea
the vinegar sea the doubleedgedandsided sea. Skeleton
like a mannequin, small enough at last, or something recognisable.
Let there be no electric light in the weed beds, I’ve had enough.
Let there be eventually blue, the only sight worth seeing.
Girl in jeans bluer than they were the day before.
Blue, which is nothing in particular.
Imogen Cassels is from Sheffield, and studies English at Cambridge. She was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2013, and in 2015 was selected as a Young Poet on the Underground. Her poetry has featured in Ambit, The Interpreter’s House, Antiphon, and Black and BLUE.
Copyright © 2016 by Imogen Cassels, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
